On writing clearly
I help out with the editorial submission queues on more than one community news site. Sometimes I just have to vent about it.
I am by no means holding myself out as some shining example of a good writer. My own writing has plenty of flaws, some of which are laughable. No thoughtful person behind a keyboard who looks at the stuff other people write really wants to be a grammar nazi.
But people, if you think you’ve got something to say that’s so important that you simply must submit it as a guest opinion piece to some publication or another — don’t you think it’s also important enough to put some time and effort into saying clearly?
If over half of your article is text in parentheses, you may need to give some more thought to grammar, sentence structure and not letting asides detract from the logical development of your ideas.
Furthermore, ellipses [… ] are not the all-purpose punctuation mark. If you are using multiple instances of ellipses within the same sentence, and that sentence follows a similar one, and they both have multiple instances of parenthetical remarks with multiple instances of ellipses within them…
Then you may want to at least glance at The Elements of Style.
In fact, you may even want to give strong consideration to the possibility that you’re just an illiterate fuck with nothing worthwhile to say.
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