[ClearCase_guy]

It was a dark and stormy night ...

[Vendome]

No All Caps?..

Ridiculous article..../s

[Menehune56]

Good stuff ping

[Dr. Sivana]

I know these are standard “rules” for “effective” writing, sometimes the passive voice is best employed.

[Pontiac]

Simple words are preferred.

I think this bit of advice has been carried to the extreme.

The NYT is written at a 9th grade level and the USA Today is written for a 7th grader.

Even the WSJ is only written for a high school senior. Who is writing for adults?

[Nifster]

meh

This has led to a lot of the crapola dumbed down writing of the advertising age.

Struck and White is still my go to

[Billthedrill]

Good advice, most of it. Taken too far one risks falling into chatspeak cant. "U", for example, is not preferable to "You" in the interest of concision.

Neither. Are sentence. Fragments.

[TChad]

Not bad.

[Bob]

Is it OK to occasionally split an infinitive? :=)

[PLMerite]

Active voice: “I’m gonna kick your ASS!”

[ctdonath2]

Go read Stephen King’s “On Writing”, chapter “Toolbox”.

[Responsibility2nd]

Bumpity bump.

[hole_n_one]

This will have me right reel good and my words will sore with knew stuff.

[Southside_Chicago_Republican]

Bookmark.

[Cedar]

Too many rules! Just say what you want to say! :)

[Redcitizen]

Tip #26- Post a reply without reading the article.

[Organic Panic]

How to communicate effectively as a liberal:

1) Yell loudly. Nothing gets your point across like yelling
2) Use profanity. You elevate your apparent intelligence with frequent profanity and vulgarity.
3) Lie. No one will check your facts.
4) Use absolutes. If someone does not agree with you that means they hate everything
5) Always call them racists.
6) End your arguments with “NAZI!”

[StAntKnee]

Nice post. I’m an early adopter of the Flesch principles and adherent to the Reading Ease statistics in Microsoft Word, which uses algorithms to give you quick reports on word count, word length, sentence length, use of the passive, and so on. I’ve published some books via Writer’s Digest, including creative ways to editor your writing by exploiting this algorithm and more.

Remember my handle. We’ll talk in private here, if you like, bc of this shared interest. Be happy to give you some advice about where the landmines are in the readability scales.

One of the things I’m researching here on FR and other sites that offer 100-word excerpts of stories on the landing page is this: Many of these excerpts don’t fulfill the promise of the headline in the first 100 words. Sometimes not even in the larger excerpt at the FR link to the larger excerpt. Boy, that’s annoying.

On the other hand, the WSJ excerpts before the paywall always give you the nut of the story.

[Newtoidaho]

Elaine wants to know if exclamation points are a good thing!!

[odawg]

Will never talk me into using “&”!!!!!!!