Lets go on our travels:

Watch Your English
How To Write Good

WATCH YOUR ENGLISH

Here's an interesting analysis of the English language:

We'll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes;

But the plural of ox is oxen, not oxes.

Then one fowl is a goose, but two are called geese,

Yet the plural of moose should never be meese!

You may find a lone mouse or a whole nest of mice,

But the plural of house is houses, not hice!

If the plural of man is always called men,

Why shouldn't the plural of pan be called pen?

If I speak of a foot, and you show me your feet,

And I give you a boot- would a pair be called beet?

If one tooth, and a whole set are teeth,

Why should not the plural of booth be called beeth?

Then one may be that and three would be those,

Yet hat in the plural would never be hose;

And the plural of cat is cats; not cose!

We speak of a brother, and also of brethren,

But though we say mother, we never say methren!

Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him,

But imagine the feminine, she, shis and shim!

So English, I fancy you all will agree

Is the funniest language you ever did see!

A Nony Mous

HOW TO WRITE GOOD

Here are several very important but often forgotten rules of English:

Avoid alliteration. Always.

Avoid cliches like the plague. (They're old hat.)

Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.

Employ the vernacular.

Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.

Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.

It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.

Contractions aren't necessary.

One should never generalize.

Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.

Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."

Don't be redundant; don't more use words than necessary; it's highly superfluous.

Comparisons are as bad as cliches.

Profanity sucks.

Be more or less specific.

Understatement is always best.

Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.

Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.

One-word sentences? Eliminate.

The passive voice is to be avoided.

Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.

Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.

Who needs rhetorical questions?

While a transcendent vocabulary is laudable, one must nevertheless keep incessant surveillance against such loquacious, effusive, voluble verbosity that the calculated objective of communication becomes ensconced in obscurity.

In a sentence, the nouns has to match the verbs.

Don't use no double negatives.

In writing, few things are, so to speak, more infuriating, than, say, commas, at least when there are too many of them, or when they should be, say, semicolons.

Proofread your work, so you don't leave some out or forget to finish

Run-on sentences are really bad because the reader saturates and what you really should be doing is using commas and semicolons and even periods to break the sentence up into more digestible chunks.

To have been using excessively complex verb constructions, is to have been bopping the literary baloney.

A friend I spoken with recently told me he been forgetting his helper verbs.