Humorous Writing Tips Checklist

My newsletters are focused on advocacy, particularly pretrial and trial advocacy and beyond. They are intended to help aspiring law students and lawyers as well as practicing lawyers and law professors and others interested in our justice system. The newsletters also will venture into other topics including humor, writing skills, overcoming the fear of public speaking, crafting and delivering a powerful presentation and more.

WANT TO BE A BETTER WRITER? Read this and have a laugh too.

Sally Bulford, a Utah lawyer, provided these humorous writing pointers under the title “How to Write Good”.

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 said, “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”
Comparisons are as bad as clichés.
Don’t be redundant; don’t use more words than necessary; it’s highly superfluous.
Be more or less specific.
Understatement is always best.
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?
Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.

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