The top ten ways you can guarantee your writing will be cool.

I wrote this up because I was sick and tired of seeing the same beginner writing mistakes over and over and over and over and... well, you get the idea. These mistakes are repeated ad nauseam even by people who ought to know better, so I decided I'd do something about it.

And no, I'm not an English teacher. I'm a degreed computer scientist --- but I'm also well-known as a grammar nazi. (I've at times been both a proscriptive grammarian and a structural linguist, so my objective here is not to correct things that intentionally deviate from standard English, but to correct things that unintentionally deviate.)

This is stored as an image so that there's no ambiguity about what I intended to say. Actually, it's designed as a printable document, and I've included a PDF version for those of you who would like to print this out for reference. This document is freely shareable. Download it, print it, share it with your friends, and maybe, just maybe, there will be a little less unreadable gibberish out there as a result.

_____________________________________________


Note: The deviantART administration has just (Dec 7 2007) moved the PDF version of this to my Scraps, despite it being identical to this version and just in a different file format.

Brilliant, guys: You scrapped the more finished, print-friendly version of this. I love how you receive no indication of which administrator moved it, and there's no way to either appeal the decision or move it yourself once they've moved it either. Yet another reminder that deviantART is not a democracy, but a monarchy with a king to whom we must all bow.

I continue to miss Jark's presence around here.