POLONIUS’ OBSCENITIES TO ATTENDANT WRITERS (to upstage the work of William Safire) And these precepts in thy memory Look thou character. For a writer Must not shift your point of view. And you yourself have of your audience Been most free and bounteous with long words When diminutivoes will do marvellous wisely. By the by, ‘to discombombulate’ is a vile clause. Now mark you: meet it is to avoid clichés like the plague. Admit no run-on sentences, so hard are they to apprehend, Never ever beguile with repetitive redundancies, For brevity is the goal of writ. Ay, and aver ‘Aroynt’ at all awkward and affected alliteration. And harpeth not on superlatives unqualified, The most unkindest cut of all. Marry, I charge you to never unseam an infinitive. A verb, contrary to kings of shreds and tatters, Have to consort with their subjects. Do not give offence with sullied forms of verbs That have snuck crabwise into the language. Pronouns should be plac’d hard by, Certainly in sentences puff’d and laboursome, Videlicet ten or more words, their antecedents. Be somewhat scanter of your un-necessary hyphens. Use semi colons according to their desert, Not after some swinish phrase; trifling of their flavours. Be thou familiar but by no means vulgar, with commas For it is they that have made your readers mad. Confine the apostrophe to it’s proper use, Not to be flouted like reechy drab’s in stews’. This above all: to thine own proofing be true, Lest, by the mass, you have words out. Such wanton, wild and usual slips Are companions noted and most known to youth. Look to’t, I charge you. Come your ways. Michael Small
April, 1990
published idiom, April, 1991 & University of Windsor Review, February, 1992, Ontario, Canada