Writing rules to live by

1. Always avoid overuse of alliteration.
   
2. A preposition is not a word to end a sentence with.
   
3. Avoid clichés like the plague. (They're old hat.)
   
4. Comparisons are as bad as clichés.
   
5. Avoid ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
   
6. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are not recommended.
   
7. Remember to never split an infinitive.
   
8. Contractions aren't necessary.
   
9. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
   
10. One should never generalize.
    
11. Take care to use apostrophe's correctly.
    
12. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."
    
13. Employ the vernacular and eschew obfuscation. (While a transcendent lexis is laudable, one must, nevertheless, maintain incessant surveillance against such loquacious, effusive and voluble verbosity that the calculated objective of communication becomes ensconced in obscurity.)
    
14. Don't use more use words than necessary, generating redundancy; it's highly superfluous.
    
15. Most of the time, it pays to be more or less specific.
    
16. The passive voice is to be avoided.
    
17. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be hunted down and liquidated.
    
18. Who needs rhetorical questions?
    
19. In a sentence, the verbs has to agree with their subjects.
    
20. Don't use no double negatives.
    
21. 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.
    
22. Proofread your work to make sure you don't leave some out.
    
23. Run-on sentences are really bad because they are hard for the reader to follow and what you really should be doing is using commas and semicolons and maybe even full-stops to break the sentence up into more digestible chunks.
    
24. About sentence fragments. Writing carefully, these and dangling participles can be avoided.