Rules for Writing

Rules for Writing


Assignment: Write your own list of rules for good writing on the model of George Orwell's in "Politics and the English Language."  Back up your rules with examples and/or explanations (as Orwell does).

If you want to interact with Orwell's text (for example, argue against any of his rules and propose your own alternatives), you may.  If you think writing can't have rules, write an eloquent critique of writing by rules as your blog post, using examples/explanations to support your point.


-- Post by Thursday, February 9.
-- Write 150 to 350 words.
English writing is not easy, especially to whose native language is not English. With years of reading and writing, in my opinion, the rules of Enlish are showed below:

1).more simple,more better.

Long sentences may make people feel you have a great knowledge of English grammar, but it is not easy for people to understand you. If your audiences can not understand your meaning, why you wrote the article.
In my opinion, a good writing is using the simple sentences and those words that can present your meanings.I don't mean those compound sentences or complex sentences with many clauses should not be used. Because sometimes, using those sentence to do explaination may make the whole article looks more structured. But, basically, if you want your writing to be impressive and easy to understand, more simple, more better.

2). Have an outline or abstract before you write.
Have an outline or abstract befor start to write can improve your writing.  Because if you have already outlined your writing, when you are writing, you can do more brainstorming on how to elaborate your ideas rather than still working hard on ideas.

3). Avoid redundancy.
When present your ideas, simplify it rather than use a lot of sentences to present one thing. Like the in-class work about redundancy, sometimes a paragraph can be present just by one simple sentence, which the paragraph cannot make the writers' meaning for clear but more confused.