- Make the scenen/information as easy as possible to visualize by the readers

- Avoid using zombie nouns

- Use active voice to emphasize the actions, passive voice to illuminate the act
so that in passive voice you can omit the actor. E.g. Mistakes were made(just
mentioned mistakes, but not who made them)
- Write from readers’ perspective
- Make no assumptions, even unknowingly, that the readers/listeners have all
the prior information that you possess.
- “We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.” Good writing starts
strong, not with a cliché (“Since the dawn of time”), not with the banality
(“Recently, scholars have been increasingly concerned with the question of
…”), but with contentful observation that provokes curiocity.
- Provide readers exotic feel, as if they were experiencing all of it on the
actual sense.
- Good writing finishes strong eg. When the land turned to dust, not “the Dust
Bowl,” when there was nothing to eat, not ‘the potato Famine’, the landless,
not the peasants.
They left.
(This abrupt ending and the expanse of blankness at the button of the page
mirror the finality of the decision to move and the uncertainty of the life that
lay ahead.)
- Good authors use:
o Fresh wording and concrete imagery over familiar verbiage and
abstract summary; an attention to the readers’ vantage point and the
target of their gaze; the judicious placement of an uncommon word or
idiom against a backdrop of simple nouns and verbs; the use of
parallel syntax; the occasional planned surprise; the presentation of
telling detail that obviates an explicit procurement; the use of meter
and sound that resonate with the meaning and mood.
o They do not hide their passion and relish that drive to ten them about
their subjects. They write as if they have something important to
SHOW (not just say).
- Get rid of ‘the curse of knowledge’ and ‘hindsight bias’.
- Keep track of what you know that they don’t.
- Write the way your readers can form visual images.
- Keep the lexicon right-handed:

o Present light and easily comprehensible information before heavy.

o Save the cognitively heaviest information for the last.
o People learn by integrating the new information with what they
already have in memory.
They don’t like it when a face is hurled at the from out of the blue and
they have to keep it levitating in short term memory until they find a
relevant background to embed it in a few moments later.
- Use of parallel syntax fosters cognition.
- Read the sentences aloud to feel how it sounds loke to the readers’ mind.
- For right branching of tree, light-before-heavy information is very important.
- Writing is often ore clearer and elegant when a writer pushes an ‘only’ or
‘not’ next to the thing it quantifies.
Eg. We choose to go to the moon not because it is easy but because it is
hard. Rather than: We don’t choose toto go to the moon because it is easy,
but because it is hard.
- Choose a construction that allows you to end a sentence with a phrase that is
heavy or information nor both.
Eg. He doesn’t know what he is talking about.
- Consider moving an adverb at the end of the verb phrase. If the adverb
conveys important information it belongs there; if it does not (such as really,
just, actually, and other hedges), it is best omitted altogether.
Eg. Flynn wanted to more definitely identify the source of the rising IW
scores Flynn wanted to identify the source of the rising IQ Scores more
definitively.
- In many cases, the quantifier naturally floats leftward away from the verb.
Eg. It seems monstrous to even suggest the possibility.  It seems
monstrous to even suggest the possibility.
Is it better to never have been born?  Is it better never to have been born?
- The distinction between who and whom is identical between he and him or
between she and her.
- Use of none:
 o None of the students was doing well.
o Almost none of them are honest.
o None but his closest friends believe his alibi.
- But ‘any’ can swing both ways:
o Are any of the children coming?
o Any of the tools if fine.
- Use of no depends upon the number of noun it quantifies:
o No man is an island.
o No men are islands.
- Neither means ‘none of the two’ and either means ‘one of the two.’ Both are
singular.
- The one in anyone and everyone; the body in anybody and everybody; and
the thing in nothing shour that they are refering to sone thing at a time, and
that makes then singular. Eg. Anyone is welcome to try; Everyone eats at my
home; Nothing is easy.
- When two singular nouns are coordinated with ‘and’, the phrase is usually
plural: eg. A fool and his money are soon parted. Frankie and Johnny were
lovers.
- But when the duo is mentally packed into a single entity, it can be singular.
Eg. Macrony and cheese is a good dinner for kids.
- A pair of gloves’ a majority of voters.
- A general rule for avoiding malaprops is to assume that the English language
never tolerates two words with the same root and different affixes (prefixes
and suffixes) but the same meaning, like amused and bemused, fortunate and
fortuitous, full and fulsome, simple and simplistic.
If you know a word and then come across a similar one with a fancy prefix
or suffix, resist the temptation to use it as a hoity-toity synonym. (“You keep
using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.”)
- Use of commas:
o Commas ser off a phrase that is not an integral constituent of a
sentence. And which as a result is not essential to understanding its
meaning.
Eg. Susan visited her friend Teresa. (Teresa is singled out as the
person Susan visited.) Susan visited her friend, Teresa. (It is only
significant that Susan visited a friend [Oh and by the way the friend’s
name is Teresa.])
 Eg: National Zoo Panda Gives Birth To 2nd, stillborn cub.  means: it
gives birth to a second cub and the cub was stillborn. But without a
comma, it would mean that she gave birth to a stillborn cub for the
second time. If the phrase had been ‘2nd, stillborn, male cub’ we would
know one more fact about the dead offspring namely that it was male.
If it had been ‘2nd stillborn male cub’, we would know that the
previous stillborn cub was male, too.

- If the supplementary phrase is short, you can skip comma. Eg. If you lived
here you would be home by now.

Colon and Semicolon:

- When two sentences are conceptually linked, but the writer feels no need to
pinpoint the coherence relation that holds between then. They can be joined
with a semicolon. Eg. Your lecture is scheduled for 5 pm; It is preceded by a
meeting. OR, Your lecture is scheduled for 5pm – it is preceded by a
meeting.
- When a coherence relation is an exemplification or elaboration, they may be
linked with a colon: like this. (When one is tempted to say: that is, in other
words, which is to say, for example, here’s what I have in mind.)

- When only two items are joined with a conjuction, they can NOT have a
comma between them. Eg: simon and Garfunkel (NOT Simon, and
Garfunkel). But when three or more items are joined, a comma must
introduce every subsequent items (oxford comma). Eg: Crosby, Stills, and
Nash.

- The use of semicolon to demonstrate lists of phrases containing commas:

Eg. My favorite performers of the 1970 are Simon and Garfunkel; Crosby,
stills, nash, and Young; and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.

Apostrophes:
- For plural nouns, apostrophes at the end without putting extra s. The
possessive of regular plural is spelled s’: He is his parents’ son.
- The apostrophe is mandatory with a letter of the alphabet (p’s and q’s), and
comma with words mentioned as words (There are too many however’s in
this paragraph), unless they are cliches like dos and don’ts or no ifs, ands, or
buts.
- Although we write cat’s pajamas and Dylan’s dreams, as soon as you replace
a noun with a pronoun, the apostrophe goes out the window: One must write
its pajamas, not it’s pajamas; your baby, not you’re baby; their car, not
they’re car; those hats are hers, outs, and theirs, not those hats are her’s,
our’s, and their’s.
- But for names ending in s like Charles and Jones, we do: Charles’s son, not
Charles’ son.

- The principles that you should worry about the most are not the ones that
govern fused participles and possessive antecedents, but the ones that govern
critical thinking and factual diligence.

- If you are making a factual claim, it should be verifiable in an edited source

—one that has been vetted by disinterested gatekeepers such as editors, fact-
checkers, or peer-reviews.

- Don’t confuse an anecdote or a personal experience with the state of the

world. Just because something happened to you or read about it in the paper
or the internet this morning, it doesn’t mean it is a trend. In a world of seven
billion people, just about anything will happen to someone somewhere, and
it is the highly unlikely events that will be selected for the news or passed
along to friends. An event is significant phenomenon only if it happens to
some appreciable number of times to the relative opportunities for it to
occur, and it is a trend only of that proportion has been shown to change
over time.