Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Transcendent[ly bad] prose

After 45 years of stumbling toward transcendence, I have finally discovered my greatest talent: I have a gift for writing really good bad sentences. It is a difficult cross to bear, but with great power comes great responsibility, so I persevere in my calling.

Today, for instance, I needed an editing exercise that would give students practice in positioning the most important information in a sentence so that it carries the greatest impact, and I came up with this:

Despite his encounters with malaria-carrying mosquitoes, poisonous snakes, and hungry piranha, the intrepid explorer on his first mission into the Amazon without a guide to help him overcome the inevitable obstacles discovered a living pterodactyl dwelling contentedly among the exotic flora and fauna near the confluence of two uncharted rivers.

Earlier, when the class was working on the dangers of overdependence on incompatible adjectives and adverbs, I gave them this:

On the other hand, if they use few adjectives but only, like, make them really incredibly wonderfully awesome, then they will have esoteric, poignant, and just plain neat prose that marvelously overshadows all that high-falutin' gussied-up bullcrap.

My ultimate achievement, however--the epitome of awfulness--occurred in a discussion of faulty parallelism:

Derrida's seminal analysis of Wenbley Weasel's "Unseemly Seeming" suggests that the free play of signification may prove disorienting to readers accustomed to works grounded in linear reasoning, anthropocentric culture, and who don't understand the French language; however, his analysis fails to consider Weasel's seemingly infinite ability to multiply meanings, his concern for non-human ways of knowing, and he translates all the French terms anyway.

"This is awful," said a student.

"Thanks," I said. "It's a gift."

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