Bad Writing Advice with a Silver Lining

In my search for clarity and conciseness (concision?) in my writing, I fight with my deep-seated urge to build bloated sentences for the sheer joy of their complexity. Imagine my horror at finding a web site that urges people who write for academia to be as complex as possible and tells them how. There are exercises on taking relatively active, if obscure, sentences and making them passive! [shudder]

If you can look past all of that truly bad advice for writers, you will find a useful list of prefixes and suffixes 'way down the page. These are useful for building words that describe exactly what you want. If you find a great root word in the Thesaurus and want to use it properly, it helps to know what these “add-ons” mean.

Stop when you get to the section on nominalization, however. Here they proceed to advise using -tion words instead of the verbs with which you started. Unless you intend to write something in which nothing happens, use verbs instead. Here's some better writing advice.