Avoid beginning sentences with words that you'd hear from a pulpit, a parent, or a professor.
Lose the excessively prescriptive and the moralizing; they can come off as condescending. Watch the use of …
And one so awful I can barely type it:
I know, I know … I've broken this advice many times in this book. I broke it in the first line of this very chapter, 80 words ago.
Warning you of danger without using never or avoid is hard to … uh, avoid.
That's true whether you're warning someone of the possibility of actual danger (Never use this curling iron near a bubble bath!) or a metaphorical one (Avoid Weblish!). (I see you, Chapter 35.)
Prescriptive, how-to instructional writing is one thing; dogmatic, bellowing copy is another.
The line between helpful/preachy and educational/flat-out bossy isn't easy to define.
But in our own work, let's be aware that a line does exist. And try—as I have tried here—not to cross it.
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