Thursday, February 26, 2009
An excerpt taken off the MINDEF forums.Damnit, I'm turning pro-army now when not too long ago I was dead set against conscription.. :p ENJOY!!
"How two rite gud"
Frank L. ViscoVice-president and Senior Copywriter at US Advertising.
My several years in the word game have learnt me several rules:
Avoid alliteration. Always.
Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
Avoid cliches like the plague. (They're old hat.)
Employ the vernacular.
Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
It is wrong to ever split up an infinitive.
Contractions aren't necessary.
Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
One should never generalize.
Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."
Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
Don't be redundant; don't use more words than necessary; it's highly superfluous.
Profanity sucks dick.
Be more or less specific.
Understatement is always best.
Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
One-word sentences? Never.
Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
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?
Be careful to use apostrophe's correctly.
Do not use them pronouns as modifiers.
And never start a sentence with a conjunction.
Didn't understand a shit?
As men become more intelligent they should understand the true intellectual equality of all men, because the relative difference between the least intelligent and the most intelligent is infinitesimally small in comparison to what is yet unknown.
– Albert Einstein
Now we know; Intelligence IS relative.Labels: How to, Humour
1:25:00 PM
