Sep 04 2008
Writing So Good It’s Bad
I have a mildly irritating little application called Pocket Express on my smartphone. Pocket Express delivers news, movie showtimes, and lots and lots of advertisements, and it’s apparently pretty ubiquitous in the world of PDA phones.
One of the items offered by Pocket Express is a travel blog. I read through it the other day, finding that it contained mediocre but mostly interesting travel writing. There was one exception: every post by one particular author was excruciatingly terrible. The content was fine–in some cases, quite interesting–but the writing style is the most offensive I’ve seen outside of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.
This author’s name is Tim Connors, and I’m sure from the content of his travelogues that he’s a nice guy. Unfortunately he really shouldn’t be writing for an audience.
After some digging, I’ve found this content on the web so you can all experience the horror firsthand. Let me quote you the first sentence from a post entitled “Mao Beer, Please“:
When one thinks of China and the Chinese, it usually evokes thoughts of burnt oil scented egg rolls, greasy fried rice, a random vegetable and meat dish drowning in a small lake of coagulating brown sauce and some poor delivery man sweating profusely as he busts his rump to hurry over your chicken lo mein just so you can palm him $20 for a $19.50 tab and fire off a “Thanks! Keep the change!” to impress that fiery little minx you picked up at the local truck stop.
I was going to try to explain the many reasons why that sentence makes me cringe, but it’s easier to just insert a picture of my reaction:
The article pretty much continues like this. Let me remind you that I am not making fun of an amateur blogger here: this man is a professional.
Connoisseurs of bad writing may also enjoy this sentence from “Off the Beaten Menu in Chinatown“, which is exactly as coherent as its title suggests:
Becoming cohesive in the later 1800’s as a place where Chinese immigrants massed, New York’s Chinatown has lived a roller coaster life of extreme ups and downs.
If I were this man’s English teacher I would circle this in red and write “see me.” In fact:
There. This has been vindicating in some small way.
I don’t mean to sound like I’m picking on you pointlessly, Tim. There’s plenty of bad writing out there. The problem with your writing is that lots of people read it, and most of those people seem to think it’s good. Travelogues are supposed to use flowery, evocative language, so you throw in a bunch of crap that makes you look smart and people just eat it up. But there is a difference between waxing poetic about pork and referring to a pig as “that sweet porcine sack of flavor that was once saved by Charlotte and her web” (I am not making this up). I know what goes through your fans’ minds when they read this:
Ha ha! “Porcine” means “pig”! I’ve read Charlotte’s Web! This is clever! I bet there are some people who don’t understand this! I had better post a comment on this blog so Tim knows how much he’s appreciated by us literary cognoscenti!
…
Wait, what?
There are many laudatory comments on your blog, including one that says you are “evocative of Hunter S. Thompson.” I don’t care what your readers think; this is an insult to Mr. Thompson, and he had the distinct disadvantage of being intoxicated most of the time.
Please, for the sake of all of us who love and defend the English language, stop writing.
If I were going to use a literary image, I’d evoke animal farm because the pigs there aren’t so cuddly, which makes it easier to eat them. Shit, man, I know what they did to those horses. We had to kill them, after that.
an example of a literary allusion that works:
“Of course, CW isn’t usually playing against broadcast networks whose prime-time audience is aging faster than Dorian Gray’s portrait, thanks to the inclusion of an hour of Republican National Convention coverage.” from a washpost article by the tv lady I ragged on a whole bunch when she couldn’t get the names of Beatles songs right.
The stuff about charlotte’s web didn’t make a single drop of sense to me. but that guy really goes through a lot of trouble to extract a whole lot of information from nothing. how can he write so much crap without saying a single word about what it taste.