Dentistry / Avoid heavy irony, the dentist tells William Hartston

I had a tooth out last Friday. "Take it easy for the rest of th day," the dentist told me. "Don't run for any buses. No heavy lifting. No gardening."

When I told him I was going back to the office he advised me to write short sentences and not to indulge in heavy irony. "A little mild sarcasm or innuendo at most," he sneered. "And you'll find yourself suffering the pains of souls in torment if you even consider any hyperbole."

"So should I specifically try to incorporate a good deal of litotes into my writings?" I asked. "That would be no bad thing," he replied. "Your prose style will also hardly be damaged if it is mostly in the passive voice."

"While we're on the ... er, well, ... I don't quite know how to, ... I mean, can I use any anacoluthon, if I really feel the need?"

"Three times an article before ... that is to say, no more than once a paragraph. "

"I was hoping to use some gerunds too," I confessed.

"I have nothing against the using of gerunds," he told me. "Healing is not damaged by writing per se, even when you indulge in employing gerunds."

"Could I possibly risk the the occasional example of tmesis?" I asked tentatively.

"Abso-dental-lutely not!" he said. "Tmesis can interfere with the healing process. We're trying to knit things together, not rip them apart to insert a dental implant..

"I suppose that cuts out malapropism too, then?" I enquired.

"I'm sorry?"

"Malapropism," I repeated.

"I'm not sure I understand," he said hesitantly. "What's the entomology of that word?"

"From Mrs Malaprop," in Sheridan's The Rivals. Daft old bat who tended to get her words muddled up," I explained.

"I wouldn't proscribe it," he said after some thought.

"Do you mean 'prescribe'?" I asked.

"No," he said. "Proscribe. Nor would I proscribe catachresis or solecism, but I hardly think you're likely to want to use them. If in doubt, of course, your scribblings would always be enhanced by a little metonymy. So be off with you and hit the inkwell."

"I think you mean," I said, by now somewhat irritated by his tone, "that the ornate and well-rounded effusions from my trusty keyboard are sufficiently filigree to incorporate a little circumlocution."

"Or a little elite alliteration," he added, "could make your querulous quill quickly quiver with emotion."

"That's a pathetic fallacy," I chided him. "Or at the very least, a transferred epithet."

He brought our meeting shuddering to a close with a gnomic proverb: "It's a wise tooth that utters synecdoche," he said, before summarising his instructions: "Short words. Short sentences," he snapped. "And above all, eschew obfuscation."