Many of my students are struggling to write good English, or at least decent English. Writing, in any language, is a considerable endeavor, and if you want to write well, with a certain will of style, then it becomes a truly brave, lifelong endeavor. Write because you've got an urgent need to communicate. This doesn't mean you don't learn how to write as a craft; for example, learning how to write argumentative essays, short stories, professional e-mails, projects, and proposals is necessary and useful. However, craft comes after ideas. The best writers are those who have a great clarity of thought about the topic. That clarity of thought helps their ideas blossom and shape up; and the clearer an idea is formed, the clearer and neater its wording is. Thus, content and form nurture each other.

There are many methods of how to write out there. Most of them just focus on the craft rather than on the content. To have some fun, I've compiled a few pieces of advice taken from Plain Language. Follow them all!


Frank L. Visco's rules for writers:

    1.    Avoid Alliteration. Always.
    2.    Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
    3.    Avoid cliches like the plague. (They're old hat.)
    4.    Employ the vernacular.
    5.    Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
    6.    Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
    7.    It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
    8.    Contractions arent necessary.
    9.    Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
    10.    One should never generalize.
    11.    Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
    12.    Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
    13.    Dont be redundant; dont use more words than necessary; its highly superfluous.
    14.    Profanity sucks.
    15.    Be more or less specific.
    16.    Understatement is always best.
    17.    Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
    18.    One word sentences? Eliminate.
    19.    Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
    20.    The passive voice is to be avoided.
    23.    Who needs rhetorical questions?


William Safire's Rules for Writers.

    1.    Parenthetical words however must be enclosed in commas.
    2.    It behooves you to avoid archaic expressions.
    3.    Avoid archaeic spellings too.
    4.    Don't repeat yourself, or say again what you have said before.
    5.    Don't use commas, that, are not, necessary.
    8.    Subject and verb always has to agree.
    11.    Don't repeat yourself, or say again what you have said before.
    12.    Use the apostrophe in it's proper place and omit it when its not needed.
    13.    Don't never use no double negatives.
    14.    Poofread carefully to see if you any words out.
    16.    Eschew obfuscation.
    17.    No sentence fragments.
    18.    Don't indulge in sesquipedalian lexicological constructions.
    19.    A writer must not shift your point of view.
    20.    Don't overuse exclamation marks!!
    22.    Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.
    24.    Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
    26.    Always pick on the correct idiom.
    27.    The adverb always follows the verb.
    30.    And always be sure to finish what

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