Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Some Geeky Editor Humor

Editors and proofreaders will appreciate this tongue-in-cheek list on http://www.creativeteachingsite.com/humorgrammar.htm.
A little geeky editor humor goes a long way on a bad day (or a good one, for that matter).

HUMOROUS GRAMMAR RULES

1. Verbs HAS to agree with their subjects.

2. Never use a preposition to end a sentence with. Winston Churchill, corrected on this error once, responded to the young man who corrected him by saying, "Young man, that is the kind of impudence up with which I will not put!

3. And don't start a sentence with a conjunction.

4. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.

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

6. Also, always avoid annoying alliteration.

7. Be more or less specific.

8. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are (usually) unnecessary.

9. Also too, never, ever use repetitive redundancies endlessly over and over again

10. No sentence fragments.

11. Contractions aren't always necessary and shouldn't be used to excess so don’t.

12. Foreign words and phrases are not always apropos.

13. Do not be redundant; do not use more words than necessary; it's highly superfluous and can be excessive

14. All generalizations are bad.

15. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.

16. Don't use no double negatives.

2 comments:

  1. We used to have this hanging on the wall in the Writing Center at CMU. I have something similar I sometimes share with my writing classes called "How to Write a Bad Paper."

    ReplyDelete
  2. We used to have this hanging on the wall in the Writing Center at CMU. I have something similar I sometimes share with my writing classes called "How to Write a Bad Paper."

    ReplyDelete