mgpcpastor's blog

Iain D Campbell provides these 26 Golden Rules For Writing Well at the Reformation 21 blog.

1.Don’t abbrev.
2.Check to see if you any words out.
3.Be carefully to use adjectives and adverbs correct.
4.About sentence fragments.
5.When dangling, don’t use participles.
6.Don’t use no double negatives.
7.Each pronoun agrees with their antecedent.
8.Just between you and I, case is important.
9.Join clauses good, like a conjunction should.
10.Don’t use commas, that aren’t necessary.
11.Its important to use apostrophe’s right.
12.It’s better not to unnecessarily split an infinitive.
13.Never leave a transitive verb just lay there without an object.
14.Only Proper Nouns should be capitalized. also a sentence should begin with a capital letter and end with a full stop
15.Use hyphens in compound-words, not just in any two-word phrase.
16.In letters compositions reports and things like that we use commas to keep a string of items apart.
17.Watch out for irregular verbs that have creeped into our language.
18.Verbs has to agree with their subjects.
19.Avoid unnecessary redundancy.
20.A writer mustn’t shift your point of view.
21.Don’t write a run-on sentence you’ve got to punctuate it.
22.A preposition isn’t a good thing to end a sentence with.
23.Avoid cliches like the plague.
24.1 final thing is to never start a sentence with a number.
25.Always check your work for accuracy and completeness.

Kevin DeYoung recommends an engaging and informative book by Roy Peter Clark, entitled ‘Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer’.
Among the observations that DeYoung gleaned from Clark’s book are:
• Avoid verb qualifiers like “sort of,” “seemed to,” and “must have” (21). It seems to me [DeYoung] I tend to do this sometimes.
• “If a writer wants the reader to think something the absolute truth, the writer should render it in the shortest sentence possible” (99).
• Dialogue advances narrative; quotes delay it (128). Christian books have too many block quotes (including a couple of my sections in Why We’re Not Emergent). Most readers skip long block quotes. Good writers leave out the stuff readers skip.

Abebooks.com are able to land this at my home for under $15, so I think I’ll have a browse.