Simple instructions from an English teacher for a great essay. 1. Don't use no double negatives. 2. Don't abbrev. 3. Personally, in my opinion, a writer or essayist should not make use of too many words or phrases which he does not necessarily need in many cases. 4. About sentence fragments. 5. Dont, use, commas, when they are, unnecessary. 6. Keep tense consistent. You didn't want to shift from present to past. 7. Use semi-colons; only between; independent clauses; don't scatter them around; indiscriminately. 8. A noun and a verb always agrees with each other. 9. Poor spelling in you're writing makes a bad impresion on a lot of reeders. 10. Slang totally freaks out some blokes, so waste it. 11. Don't repeat; don't be redundant. Don't say the same thing twice, don't be repetitious. 12. Writing dangling modifiers, readers will be confused. 13. A noun must agree with their antecedents. 14. Their is a difference between the use of there and you're use of they're, to. Your two use them correctly in more than too cases. 15. You should avoid the use of nonspecific pronouns in your writing. 16. Well, let me tell you about the mistake that makes a teacher weep enough tears to fill a well. Well, here it is. The use of well at the beginning of a sentence is not only wrong, but... well, stop doing it! 17. But whatever you do, don't compound this crime by substituting ""but"" for ""well"" at the beginning of your sentence. And just to clarify the point, don't start with ""and"" either. 18. After all these mistakes, another one that is worse then the well issue above is than/then because students always seem to confuse the two, than think they are interchangable. 19. English teachers, who are wonderful and skillful in their teaching methods, particularly hate it when their students feel they can take up space and word count by complimenting the very amazing, beautiful, and downright swell righters that they are writing about. 20. Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.