Nuggets of Doomed Grandiloquence, Vol. 1

When I taught writing at the college level, the end of every semester meant a grading binge that would effectively fry your brain. One coping mechanism we devised to plow through the miles of prose (written the night before, no doubt) was to look for those nuggets of doomed grandiloquence that were so tortured, so terrifically bad as to cause involuntary gagging in the grader.

We would remove the students’ names and bundle the offending sentences into an email to our colleagues, who would reply with a few they found. It was great fun.

Our good friend Nathan is still teaching and is keeping the tradition alive with a Facebook post every semester, which he has graciously allowed me to excerpt below. Nathan would like to emphasize that he is constantly encouraging his students to revise. These few just don’t listen.

If we couldn’t laugh, we might cry. Remember that these snafus occur at the end of an entire semester devoted to learning to write:

• “He had everything down packed.”
• “When he robbed the bank he did not think of how it would enact on his children all he thought about was himself.”
• “Edmund in the first of the novel is scummed by one of the witches spells being Turkish Delight.” (Scummed may actually be genius.)
• “If we choose to undergo torture on a captured foreign insurgent, we should suspect that if any of our men are captured that the same treatments will be used, if not in the same war, then in previous wars to come.”

And now, some juicy ones from past years:

• “The sad truth is that while writing this paper, hundreds of immigrants have entered this country illegally.” (It took hundreds of immigrants to write this paper? Look up “Dangling Modifier” if you don’t get what’s awkward about this sentence.)
• “All of the advertisments were comparable in that they all provided the fastest most efficient pain relief.”
• “I think this ad is very convincing because I hate going to the dentist office along with many people in the United States.” (Is it because of the long wait?)
• “If all our advertisements were about restaurants then we would become to numb to them, which will occur after a long period of time, but not in short sitting sessions.” (Try saying that 5 times fast.)

Until next semester!