"For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity's affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss - a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world's thirstiest gerbil."
That's this year's winner of the annual bad writing contest known as the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.
The content is absurd, but the syntax is elegant. So this is "bad writing" but it isn't amateurish or incompetent writing. I untangle worse sentences every day -- sentences that seem to have been written by gerbils.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
In defining bad writing, Orwell said, "The passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active..." And we should avoid clichés like the plague.
ReplyDelete