rules for writers

An oldie but a goodie . . .

1. Verbs HAS to agree with their subjects.
2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
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.
10. No sentence fragments.
11. Contractions aren’t necessary and shouldn’t be used.
12. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
13. Do not be redundant; do not use more words than necessary; it’s highly superfluous.
14. One should NEVER generalize.
15. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
16. Don’t use no double negatives.
17. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
18. One-word sentences? Eliminate.
19. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
20. The passive voice is to be ignored.
21. Eliminate commas, that are, not necessary. Parenthetical words however should be enclosed in commas.
22. Never use a big word when a diminutive one would suffice.
23. Kill all exclamation points!!!
24. Use words correctly, irregardless of how others use them.
25. Understatement is always the absolute best way to put forth earth shaking ideas.
26. Use the apostrophe in it’s proper place and omit it when its not needed.
27. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”
28. If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a thousand times: Resist hyperbole; not one writer in a million can use it correctly.
29. Puns are for children, not groan readers.
30. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
31. Even IF a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
32. Who needs rhetorical questions?
33. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
34. Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.

Can you think of any more?

Number 29 is dedicated to Archie & FFE and the pic is for alejna.

things I miss…

I came across this old post from last year on Letters Home the other day. Oh how I wish everyone had a ‘recent comments’ widget for people just passing through or for when I’m just having a quick look around a few blogs without using my feedreader. In fact, I probably would have just read the comment to this post on my feedreader without clicking on the post itself. But seeing it on ian’s sidebar I clicked on the comment and saw the original post. Anyhoodle … it was all about things ian misses from the places he used to live after having moved on to somewhere else.

Like ian, I’ve lived in a few different places since leaving my birthplace Winnipeg, Canada (aka Winterpeg) at age 25. Since then I’ve lived in Toronto, Bristol in England, and Salamanca & Seville in Spain. Here is my list of things I miss …

do you speak ikea?

The Ikea Game

Flickr creator Cal Henderson has come up with the Ikea Game, in which people try to identify what type of furnishings those bizarre sounding Ikea names refer to. According to this Grauniad article there’s a way to win the Ikea game every time, but it involves learning Swedish and a lot of Scandanavian place names.

Ikea product names follow a system: because the company’s founder, Ingvar Kamprad, is dyslexic, he found that naming products with proper names and words made them easier to identify.

Sofas, coffee tables, bookshelves, media storage and doorknobs are named after places in Sweden (Klippan, Malmö); beds, wardrobes and hall furniture after places in Norway; carpets after places in Denmark and dining tables and chairs after places in Finland. Bookcases are mainly occupations (Bonde, peasant farmer; Styrman, helmsman). Bathroom stuff is named after lakes and rivers.

Kitchens are generally grammatical terms, and kitchen utensils are spices, herbs, fish, fruits, berries, or functional words such as Skarpt (it means sharp, and it’s a knife). Chairs and desks are Swedish men’s names (Roger, Joel); materials and curtains are women’s names. Children’s items are mammals, birds and adjectives (Ekorre is a set of children’s toy balls; it means squirrel).

Hmmm… I got 4/10.

Looks like I’m going to have to do some serious catalogue cramming.

a piece of cake

So yeah, it all turned out to be a piece of cake, in more ways than one.

Let me explain. . .

cupboardy?

Actually, it sounds like a fine word to me. Wandering Coyote sent this to me yesterday and I thought I’d pass it on. Lots of us are playing Scrabulous these days, either by email or on Farcebook.

If you’d like to play just drop me an email.

 

how’s your vocabulary?

I’d be feeling a lot more smug if I hadn’t had to look up multifarious …

Your Vocabulary Score: A

Congratulations on your multifarious vocabulary! You must be quite an erudite person.

How’s Your Vocabulary?

 

it’s its there their they’re quiz

You Scored an A

You got 10/10 questions correct. It’s pretty obvious that you don’t make basic grammatical errors. If anything, you’re annoyed when people make simple mistakes on their blogs. As far as people with bad grammar go, you know they’re only human. And it’s humanity and its current condition that truly disturb you sometimes.

The It’s Its There Their They’re Quiz

Well, I reckon that last sentence is pretty accurate.
And now I’m off to email this quiz to some of my students . . .

 

there and back again

Genesis 11:7 from The Brick Testament.

Come, let us go down there and confuse their language, so that they cannot understand each other’s speech.

A couple of days ago I saw this wonderful video over at Ration Reality, showing a film that had been translated from English into French, then into German, then back into French, then back into English using a popular translation website. And I commented there that I thought a similar technique was used for translating restaurant menus in Sevilla. I thought I was joking.

Then today I was having a look at the referrers on my Sevilla Tapas blog, as I am always curious to see how people are finding the place. And I saw something odd.

Someone had used a translator on the Food Translations page (which is a list of Spanish food names translated and described in English) to translate it all into Spanish. And the curious thing was that the words that were originally in Spanish started going a bit wonky when they were ‘re-translated’.

So of course the next step had to be translating the whole thing back into English just to see if this is really how they translate menus here. And you know what? Well, just check it out and decide for yourself. Some of it is almost normal, other bits are totally bizarre.

When things stop making any sense at all just refer back to the Food Translations page.

black bastard?

Had to start a new category for this - guess which one.

Why on Earth would anyone use this name for anything at all, let alone an energy drink? Any bets on how long they stay in business without a name change?

Over at the Black Bastard Website you can contact them by email and complain, since this choice of brand name seems to be intentionally racist and not simply an example of a cross cultural marketing blunder.

Wandering further around the blogosphere today I also came across this BBC article about an unfortunate name choice for a restaurant in Mumbai.

~ found on Letters Home To You ~

avast, me hearties!

My pirate name is:

Red Mary Rackham

 

Passion is a big part of your life, which makes sense for a pirate.

You have the good fortune of having a good name,
since Rackham (pronounced RACKem, not rack-ham)
is one of the coolest sounding surnames for a pirate. Arr!

Get your own pirate name from piratequiz.com.

Celebrating Talk Like A Pirate Day

~ plundered from collecting tokens … Arrr! ~