Guide to Grammar and Style -- R

From the Guide to Grammar and Style by Jack Lynch.
Comments are welcome.

Re.

Avoid using re where concerning, regarding, or about will do the trick, as in "Re your memo of 13 January . . . ." It makes your writing jargony.

Recasting Sentences.

When you're faced with a stylistic problem you can't easily solve, it's often wise to scrap the troublesome sentence and start from scratch, perhaps using a completely different construction. For instance, if you're bothered by a problem with his and her -- "Just as a musician has to be a master of his or her instrument, a writer is at his or her best when he or she has mastered his or her linguistic tools" is downright cumbrous -- scrap it all, and use something like "Mastery of words is as important to a writer as mastery of an instrument is to a musician." There's nothing wrong with avoiding such problems; he who fights and runs away lives to fight another &c.

Redundancy.

Pay attention to redundant words and phrases, as in actual reality and anticipate for the future. See Different.

Relative Pronouns.

See Pronouns and That versus Which.

Revision.

The writing process isn't over when you reach the end -- it's hardly begun. Pay attention to a maxim often quoted in composition classes: "There is no writing, only rewriting." And that means much more than simple proofreading. You should always spend a lot of time revising your work -- looking not only for outright grammatical errors, but also hunting down wasted words, improving clarity and precision, and working on your transitions. I know it pains beginning writers to hear that they have so much work to do, but it's really unavoidable. Not even professional writers get it all right in the first draft, so you should be prepared to put as much energy into revision as you do into the original composition.

Run-On Sentences.

Just as there's nothing inherently wrong with a long word, there's nothing wrong with a long sentence. But it has to be grammatical. A run-on sentence is ungrammatical, not just long. It often happens when two sentences are run into one without the proper subordination or punctuation. Two sentences glued together with only a comma produce a comma splice, a kind of run-on: for instance, "The semester runs through April, the break begins in May." There are a number of ways of fixing this comma-splice: "The semester runs through April. The break begins in May"; "The semester runs through April, and the break begins in May"; "The semester runs through April; the break begins in May"; "The semester runs through April, whereas the break begins in May," and so on. See Semicolon and Dependent versus Independent Clauses.