Your school may have taught you not to use a preposition to end a sentence. This is a hangover from Latin and Greek – sentences in those languages never ended with prepositions.

Years ago I worked in the public relations department of Britain’s Science and Engineering Research Council. My boss took me to task for ending a sentence with a preposition.

He told me it was; “Something, up with which, I will not put” – a quote from Winston Churchill.*

The grammar police won’t agree, but this is a rule you can comfortably ignore for everyday writing, business writing, journalism and all types of online communications.

In practical everyday writing there will be many cases when it doesn’t make sense to contort your sentences to avoid ending with a proposition. Your writing will be clearer and easier to understand.

And you’ll be in great company. Most newspaper style guides allow it, most popular authors and the overwhelming majority of modern literary authors sidestep the rule.

*Churchill was on my side in this. I suspect my boss didn’t realise the quote was a joke.

There's a lot of talk and writing online about the New Zealand government's super city plan for Auckland.

The correct style for super city is two lower case words.

The term is not a name, at least not yet. It is a description.

Capitals are only used for proper names, so there's no confusion or question over the term.

Nor is it one word.

There's a fashion of running two words together and separating the components with a capital letter.

If a company or organisation wishes to do that with its name, or the name of a product, it has every right to do so.

But there's no grammatical or logical reason to make a single word out of super city. Would you write Auckland is a BigCity? Of course not.

Fairfax's Stuff.co.nz web site is confused about this. At the time of writing the newspaper company's site has an Auckland Super City page which offers every permutation: one word, two words, upper case lower case. The New Zealand Herald is just as confused as this search shows: "supercity" Search Results. In fact it adds a previously unseen variation: Supercity, all one word with a single capital.

For clarification and background you may like to read my earlier article about capital letters.

Short sentences are usually best.

Newspapers teach journalists to write a single thought in a sentence. That way the meaning is clearer.

The Economist Style Guide makes a joke of this in its guide to punctuation:

Use plenty. They keep sentences short. This helps the reader.

Much as I love short sentences, using too many of them makes writing boring and hard to read. They can also be uneconomical.

As Harold Evans points out in Newsman’s English:

Often it is wasteful to introduce a subject and predicate for each idea. The subordinate clause in a complex sentence can state relations more precisely and more economically than can a strong of simple sentences or compound sentences joined by and, but, so, etc.

There’s another reason to use complex sentences in your writing. They add rhythm.

Use too many short sentences and your copy will have a staccato flow annoying and distracting readers. Use too many long sentences and your writing will lack pace. You may lull your readers to sleep.

A similar logic applies to paragraphs. View them as bundles of closely related thoughts.

There’s no hard and fast rule about the best length for paragraphs. It’s a good idea to minimise the number of one sentence paragraphs you write. As with sentences, vary the pace. Too many consecutive short paragraphs is annoying. Too many long ones is hard work for the reader. Both approaches are difficult to read.

Above all else use paragraphs to make your writing easier to read.

Short snappy writing works best online.

First, people are less ready to read long pieces online than short articles.

Second, people read online material about 25 percent slower than print. Jakob Nielsen explains why in In defence of print. Nielsen wrote his article in 1996, but things haven't changed.

Third,  people get distracted easily online. There are advertisements and links to other web sites as well as bleeping notification of incoming emails, tweets and instant messages.

If you write a brief article there's a more chance readers will get to the end before skipping off elsewhere.

Fourth, skilled writers aim for brevity because good, vigourous English is concise.

A writer's goal is to get messages to readers as swiftly and as accurately as possible.

Get on. Say what you need to say. Get off.

Leave the fancy, flowery stuff to poets and fiction writers.

Write mainly with nouns and verbs. Only use adjectives if they help make your meaning more precise.

In his book Daily Mirror Style, Keith Waterhouse describes the journalist’s view of adjectives. He says:

Adjectives should not be allowed in newspapers unless they have something to say.

Writers think adjectives add colour to their words. They do. But colourful writing isn’t necessarily easier to understand. In volume one of Editing and Writing, another newspaper journalist Harold Evans says adjectives give writing a superficial glitter.

He goes on to say:

Every adjective should be examined to see: is it needed to define the subject or is it there for emphasis?

Evans says “over-emphasis destroys credibility”.

Take care when using adjectives for emphasis. For example, the word 'very' adds nothing to a phrase. It can usually be left out without changing the meaning. The same usually applies to really, actually, rather and quite.

In practice many adjectives have no substance. You can removed most from your sentences. You won’t lose much, but you will gain clarity.

On a personal note, I’ve been paid to write by the word for many years so I loaded my copy with lucrative adjectives – but my writing would certainly better without them.

For the record:

Nouns name people, places, things and ideas.

Verbs are doing words. They tell you what is going on. We say

Adjectives modify nouns by telling you what kind it is, how many and which is the one being talked about.

Adverbs do the same job for verbs.

Because it is more direct and easier to understand, the active voice is preferable to the passive voice.

With the active voice a subject (noun) acts (verb) on an object (noun). In the passive voice the object is acted on by the subject.

For example:

Active: Andy kicked the ball

Passive: The ball was kicked by Andy.

The active voice makes for tighter writing and easier reading. It is more personal and less formal.

You’ll notice in the example the passive version uses six words while the active phrase required only four and has simpler grammar. It’s both economical and clear.

Readers find active voice phrases easier to understand as they involve fewer stages – or as someone once said “fewer mental hoops to jump through”. This becomes important in more complex sentences and longer pieces of text.

The active voice also reads as if the writer is confident about the facts. In contrast, phrases and sentences written in the passive voice seem tentative or uncertain. You’ll  find bureaucrats and corporate managers hiding behind the passive voice’s ambiguities.

For example, in the phrase; “the claims have been analysed”, it’s not clear who did the analysis. On the other hand; “We analysed the claims” is pretty clear.

Things get worse when the writer resorts to using the word ‘it’ instead of ‘I’ or ‘we’:

In the sentence “It was decided no claims would be payable” the author is deliberately hiding behind the ‘it’ implying that authority comes from on high an not identifying the person who did the deciding.

There are times when you need to use the passive voice. We’ll look at them in another post.

Newspapers teach journalists to write using the inverted pyramid.

It isn’t always right, but the inverted pyramid has worked well for news writing since the days reporters telegraphed dispatches to editors. Today it works well for online writing.

The structure echoes the classic essay structure you were taught — or should have been taught — at school.

The basic format is:

• Introduction — say what the piece is about; Answer questions like who, what, where and when. You can also explain why at this point, although that can wait until later.
• Then — expand, amplify;
• Keep doing this until you’ve told the whole story. Make the most important points first then add more and more detail in each additional paragraph.

Traditional newspaper editors cut a story from the bottom if it needs to fill a specific space on a printed page.

The inverted pyramid structure, with each paragraph being progressively less important, means editors remove the least crucial information first.

A news story written using the inverted pyramid structure can be cut at the end of any paragraph, even the first paragraph, and still be a self-contained story.

Online this means search engines pay more attention to the most important words – which helps people find your writing. Those opening paragraphs also make neat summaries for listings and similar online uses.

So, the most important information goes in the first paragraph and each extra paragraph of subsidiary information carries progressively less weight. That’s where the inverted pyramid name comes from: the foundation sits at the top, the less important details are at the bottom.

Our schools taught us never to start sentences with "And".

And yet newspaper journalists do it all the time. It is one of the first writing rules professional writers learn to break.

There's nothing wrong with using "And" to begin a sentence or a paragraph.

It is a great way to smooth the flow of a series of short sentences that would otherwise seem too staccato for comfortable reading.

However, it works best if you only break this rule in moderation. Overusing "And" at the start of sentences quickly makes your text boring.

As Keith Waterhouse points out in the excellent Daily Mirror Style, if you write too many sentences starting with the word, your prose will read like the New English Bible.

I consciously limit my use of sentences beginning with "And". As a rule of thumb I aim for only one "And" sentence start in a short piece. For longer stories, you can get away with using it a few times. But control any urge to sprinkle sentences starting with "And" through your copy.

Other conjunctions

The school rule didn't just apply to "And", starting sentences with other conjunctions was equally forbidden. As an aside, conjunctions are 'joining' words used to string phrases together – usually, but not always, to build more complex sentences.

There are plenty of alternative conjunctions to call on at the start of your sentences:

• "But" is a great way to start a sentence that disagrees with the previous one.
• "Yet" is a less-frequently used alternative.
• "Or" is a great word for helping text flow.
• Some editors don't like sentences to start with "However". I would regard that as another rule worth breaking.
• "Although" is a possibility. In practice it is better to shorten the word to "Though" at the start of a sentence.

More ideas

Michelle Pierce covered this subject nicely in Three Grammar Rules You Can (And Should) Break for Copyblogger.