Tsk
Legacy Name: Tsk

     The world today has, indeed, gone quite mad. Not only does an abomination exist that people call "text speak", but many actually use it in an attempt to communicate! My dear reader, words were created for a reason! To make communication possible between two humans. In that endeavour, it is vital that the two individuals actually speak the same language. Now, obviously, I speak English. With the occasional bit of French, German, Lithuanian and Swahili.

     I write in the same way I was taught. However this 'double spacing between paragraphs' shenanigans is being forced upon me! It's not that way in novels or non-fiction books! No sir. Apparently, so I have been told, it is an "easier way to read". Rubbish. The younger generation are getting too relaxed to learn the proper rules! Some would call them lazy, but tell the truth, the younger lot have been more polite to me for years than those of my age. *harrumphs* It's as though some think getting older is an excuse to be cranky. But I digress.

     I simply want everyone to be able to communicate effectively. Is that so much to ask, I tell you? I think not. It takes me a damnably long time to try to figure out what on Earth has been said. Some people think I'm old and doddering. Not at all. I am simply taking my time figuring out what hieroglyphics the young ones have invented. It took me weeks to figure out what "xD" meant. It took my grand niece turning her phone sideways for me to understand. I thought they had done away with the emojiwhatsits things. Apparently not.

     So it falls upon myself to make sure that the young ones have a proper education.

- 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 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.
- Be more or less specific.
- Understatement is always best.
- Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
- One word sentences? Eliminate.
- 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?
- Parenthetical words however must be enclosed in commas.
- It behooves you to avoid archaic expressions.
- Avoid archaeic spellings too.
- Don’t repeat yourself, or say again what you have said before.
- Don’t use commas, that, are not, necessary.
- Do not use hyperbole; not one in a million can do it effectively.
- Never use a big word when a diminutive alternative would suffice.
- Subject and verb always has to agree.
- Placing a comma between subject and predicate, is not correct.
- Use youre spell chekker to avoid mispeling and to catch typograhpical errers.
- Don’t repeat yourself, or say again what you have said before.
- Use the apostrophe in it’s proper place and omit it when its not needed.
- Don’t never use no double negatives.
- Poofread carefully to see if you any words out.
- Hopefully, you will use words correctly, irregardless of how others use them. 1. Eschew obfuscation.
- No sentence fragments.
- Don’t indulge in sesquipedalian lexicological constructions.
- A writer must not shift your point of view.
- Don’t overuse exclamation marks!!
- Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents.
- Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.
- If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
- Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
- Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.
- Always pick on the correct idiom.
- The adverb always follows the verb.
- Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors.
- If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be by rereading and editing.
- And always be sure to finish what

The first set of rules was written by Frank L. Visco and originally published in the June 1986 issue of Writers’ digest. The second set of rules is derived from William Safire’s Rules for Writers.
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Fair or not, your spelling skills are used throughout your life to evaluate you as a person. A study of Fortune 500 human resource people were published, saying that of the people who applied for work, some 85% of them had thrown away a resume or cover letter of an applicant that had even just one or two spelling errors. The logic was, if you didn’t care enough about your application to make sure everything was spelled correctly, then you couldn’t be trusted to care enough about your job - where a tiny spelling error might undo an important business deal or cost the company money.

So how do you improve your spelling?

There is no substitute for reading a lot.
Just as we learn spoken language by hearing lots of people speaking, we learn written language, including spelling, by reading what a lot of people write. Spelling is not about how a word sounds, it’s about how it looks on the page, which means you have to look at a lot of words on the page to learn how they are spelled. End of story, really – the first step to improving your spelling has to be to read a lot (and it should go without saying, read a lot of stuff that’s spelled correctly; txtng ur frnds may b fun bt isn’t going 2 hlp ur spllng).

Make a list of your commonly misspelled words.
When you catch yourself spelling the same word wrong over and over, write it down somewhere (back of a diary is a good place). When you get a chance, look it up and put the correct spelling next to it. (Make sure you mark which is correct!) Unlike the massive lists of "commonly misspelled words" in the back of dictionaries and the like, this is a custom list that reflects the words and spelling rules you have trouble with - so instead of a huge list of Other People’s Problems you have a custom-made guide to your own.

Use mnemonics.
There’s an MnM in mnemonic! Mnemonics are memory tricks or devices, like "i before e except after c". Since spelling rules are often abstract and, in English, even contradictory (what sound does "gh" make?), they are hard to memorize by themselves. Mnemonics sneak in through a different part of your mind, by rhyming, presenting an image, or forming a pattern that makes better sense than "that’s just how it’s spelled".
Here are some examples of spelling mnemonics:

- A piece of pie
- You hear with your ear.
- Pull apart to separate.
- Definite has 2 i’s in it
- There is a place just like here.
- Because: Big Elephants Can Always Understand Small Elephants
- Cemetery has three e’s eee! like a scream.
- IN NO CENTury is murder an innocent crime.
- Slaughter is LAUGHTER with an S at the beginning.

From an article written by Dustin Wax on lifehack.org
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