A Way with Words

The world of podcasts has opened up my working days to a wide range of entertaining and informative distractions. Last week I stumbled upon San Diego NPR station KPBS's A Way with Words. The hosts have a wonderful gift for gab and ability to educate the masses on the language with the most words on the planet: English.

In a show last week they ran through some of their favorite gems from their Fifty Rules for Writing Good collection. Here are the first 25:

Fifty Rules for Writing Good

English teachers and journalists have been passing around a list of self-contradictory rules of usage for more than a century, and we've been collecting and creating them for almost half of one. Now we can offer you one of the largest accumulations gathered into a single space. We call them "Fifty Rules for Writing Good." Whatever you think of these slightly cracked nuggets of rhetorical wisdom, just remember that all generalizations are bad.

1. Each pronoun should agree with their antecedent.

2. Between you and I, pronoun case is important.

3. A writer must be sure to avoid using sexist pronouns in his writing.

4. Verbs has to agree with their subjects.

5. Don't be a person whom people realize confuses who and whom.

6. Never use no double negatives.

7. Never use a preposition to end a sentence with. That is something up with which your readers will not put.

8. When writing, participles must not be dangled.

9. Be careful to never, under any circumstances, split infinitives.

10. Hopefully, you won't float your adverbs.

11. A writer must not shift your point of view.

12. Lay down and die before using a transitive verb without an object.

13. Join clauses good, like a conjunction should.

14. The passive voice should be avoided.

15. About sentence fragments.

16. Don't verb nouns.

17. In letters themes reports and ad copy use commas to separate items in a series.

18. Don't use commas, that aren't necessary.

19. "Don't overuse 'quotation marks.'"

20. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are (if the truth be told) superfluous.

21. Contractions won't, don't, and can't help your writing voice.

22. Don't write run-on sentences they are hard to read.

23. Don't forget to use end punctuation

24. Its important to use apostrophe's in the right places.

25. Don't abbrev.

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