A technique some people find useful for generating good passwords is to take the first letter of a phrase to use for their password. Applying the following techniques can make a bad password reasonable, and a good password better, without making them much harder to remember. Applying two or three of these techniques to a good password can make it almost uncrackable. Embed extra characters in the word. Symbols and control characters are especially good.
Digits are good, too.
Misspell words, e.g. buckarew or bonzaye. Use unusual capitalization. So John might want to use bUCkarOo or baNzaI. Concatenate two or more words or parts of words. Again, combining two or three of the above is even better. And DO NOT use any of the above examples as passwords.