Getting Rid of Clutter
If your house or office is anything like mine, you probably struggle with the tendency to
accumulate "stuff" and the resultant feeling of being cluttered. It's all too easy for writing to
suffer from the same problem of clutter. In general, most of us tend to include more words than
necessary when we write. The cardinal rule in most writing, especially technical writing, is
"Keep it simple!" Most readers have a short attention span. If you can't hook them and keep them
interested, they will either look elsewhere or, if they have no choice about reading what you
have written, they will resent you for making it more complicated than necessary and very likely
not hear the message you are trying to communicate. Below are some common phrases that add
to the "fat content" of your writing, phrases which should be ruthlessly cut from your
communication.

Cut these phrases:
"a personal friend" (what other kind of friends are there?)
"It should be pointed out that..." (okay, just point it out)
"at this point in time..." (try something shorter, like "now" or even "these days")
"do a study of the effects of..." (what about just "study the effects of")
"There are some people who think..." (again, just "some people think")
"impact" as a verb (though this one is so entrenched that perhaps it's a losing battle)
 

Many pairs of words frequently get mixed up in writing.  Here are some:
    allude (to refer to something indirectly) vs. elude (to avoid or escape someone or
    something)
    compose (as in "Water is composed of hydrogen & oxygen.") vs. comprise (as in "Water
    comprises hydrogen & oxygen molecules.")
    disinterested (impartial) vs. uninterested (not interested)
    effect (noun, meaning "result") vs. affect (verb, meaning "to influence")
    faze (to worry or disturb) vs. phase (a stage or level of development or growth)
 

Watch for the following:
Are you using the passive voice appropriately (it does have a place, but is often
    over-used)?
    Are you using "weak modifiers" (e.g. pretty, quite, hopefully, etc.)?
    Are you using jargon or slang that is not appropriate to the audience?
    Are you using sexist, racist or libelous language?
    Are you consistent in your use of American or British spelling (especially important for
    Canadians, since we use both)?
    Are you consistent in the way you deal with numbers (e.g. hyphenating compound numbers,
    spelling out per cent or using the % sign, the seventies or the 70s, etc.)?
 
 

There are certain problems that seem to turn up often in writing. Here are a few common ones:
  1.Misplaced modifiers: Yoko Ono will talk about her husband, John Lennon, who was killed
    in an interview with Barbara Walters.
  2.Ambiguous pronoun references: Guilt, vengeance, and bitterness can be emotionally
    destructive to you and your children. You must get rid of them.
  3.Spelling errors: To celebrate at feasts, the inhabitants of old England sometimes cut the
    head off the biggest bore and carried it around on a platter.
  4.Dangling participles: Washed from a layer of mudstone estimated to be more than 3
    million years old, a young American paleo-anthropologist has found several leg bones and
    a skull fragment.
  5.Missing commas in relative clauses: Before I make any plans, I have to talk to my wife
    who is working evenings [as opposed to my other wife who works during the daytime!].

Mark also sends us this tidbit, which is, at least in part, often credited to William Safire.

HOW TO WRITE GOOD
Here are several very important but often forgotten rules of English:
  1.Avoid alliteration. Always.
  2.Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
  3.Avoid cliches like the plague. (They're old hat.)
  4.Employ the vernacular.
  5.Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
  6.Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
  7.It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
  8.Contractions aren't necessary.
  9.Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
 10.One should never generalize.
 11.Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: "I hate quotations. Tell me what
    you know."
 12.Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
 13.Don't be redundant; don't use more words than necessary; it's highly superfluous.
 14.Profanity sucks.
 15.Be more or less specific.
 16.Understatement is always best.
 17.Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
 18.One-word sentences? Eliminate.
 19.Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
 20.The passive voice is to be avoided.
 21.Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
 22.Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
 23.Who needs rhetorical questions?
 24.While a transcendent vocabulary is laudable, one must nevertheless keep incessant
    surveillance against such loquacious, effusive, voluble verbosity that the calculated
    objective of communication becomes ensconced in obscurity.
 25.In a sentence, the nouns has to match the verbs.
 26.Don't use no double negatives.
 27.In writing, few things are, so to speak, more infuriating, than, say, commas, at least when
    there are too many of them, or when they should be, say, semicolons.
 28.Proofread your work, so you don't leave some out or forget to finish
 29.Run-on sentences are really bad because the reader saturates and what you really should be
    doing is using commas and semicolons and even periods to break the sentence up into more
    digestible chunks.
 30.To have been using excessively complex verb constructions, is to have been bopping the
    literary baloney.
 31.A friend I spoken with recently told me he been forgetting his helper verbs.