Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Advice for Writers

My new cyberfriend and sometime commenter on this blog, Dr. John Linna of Neenah, Wisconsin, posted some very good advice for writers last week on his blog. I am now going to pass that advice along to you. If I knew where it came from, I would give the author credit.

Advice for Writers

In promulgating your esoteric cogitations or articulating your superficial sentimentalities and amicable philosophical or psychological observations, beware of platitudinous ponderosity.

Let your conversational communications possess a compacted conciseness, a clarified comprehensibility, a coalescent cogency and a concatenated consistency.

Eschew obfuscation and all conglomeration of flatulent garrulity, jejune babblement and asinine affectations.

Let your extemporaneous descants and unpremeditated expatiations have intelligibility and voracious vivacity without rodomontade or thrasonical bombast.

Sedulously avoid all polysyllabic profundity, pompous prolificacy and vain vapid verbosity.

Say what?

In other words, boys and girls, be brief and don’t use big words.

Dr. John is a Lutheran pastor who wouldn’t purposely lead you astray, so if you know what’s good for you, read and heed. If you reject what’s good for you, nothing I might say could possibly help.

5 comments:

  1. This is GREAT! And don't forget to "Stamp out and eradicate superfluous redundancy," as my son likes to say.

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  2. Ruth, glad you liked it!

    Tracie, thanks for the reminder. I'm passing your suggestion along as an action item to our Department of Redundancy Department.

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  3. Oh, some really, really good advice here! Sounds like someone putting to use several weeks' worth of Dictionary.com Words-of-the-Day!!

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<b>Always true to you, darlin’, in my fashion</b>

We are bombarded daily by abbreviations in everyday life, abbreviations that are never explained, only assumed to be understood by everyone...