Sublime

But woe to the public figure who violates these unwritten social rules about which terms are acceptable and which have become verboten.

All olive oil contains free fatty acids. To be described as extra virgin, an oil must contain less than one percent of these acids. More than one percent but less than one and a half, and you have a vierge fine. Anything above this, up to 3.3 percent, can only qualify as virgin.”

Most adverbs are unnecessary. You will clutter your sentence and annoy the reader if you choose a verb that has a specific meaning and then add an adverb that carries the same meaning.

E. B. White makes the case cogently in The Elements of Style, a book every writer should read once a year, when he suggests trying to rearrange any phrase that has survived for a century

A poet must be the master of simile, metaphor, and form, and of the precise use of vernacular and grammar, implication and innuendo.

are Euphemists. I mean merely that short words startle them, while long words soothe them. And they are utterly incapable of translating the one into the other, however obviously they mean the same thing.

But if the speaker’s conversation is ragged—if his sentences trail off, if his thoughts are disorderly, if his language is so tangled that it would embarrass him—the writer has no choice but to clean up the English and provide the missing links.