I occasionally teach creative writing; last week’s class involved an exercise where we took the “World’s Worst Poem” (according to Google) and fixed it. One of the people noted that she was able to see many faux pas in the author’s style of which she, herself, was guilty. We all had a look at the poem and, regretfully, each one of us could find at least one problem which was evident in our own writing.
This made me think: have you ever checked out some really bad academic writing? If you do a quick search for “world’s worst essay”, you’ll get some prime examples. (Caveat: the first link Google comes up with is an essay which has an extraordinary amount of inappropriate language, so don’t click on it if that sort of thing bothers you… no, I’m not giving you the link to it. )
This essay comes up in several places on the internet. It looks like it was written by a 7-year-old who drank too much Red Bull. It’s a good essay to read if you’re at all inclined to rambling, though; you’ll never want to ramble again.
Here is a college admission essay which is the epitome of pretentiousness and inappropriate vocabulary. You’ll have to scroll down and click on “read more of this essay”.
It would be a good exercise to print out these two paragraphs and mark them up with a big red pen, as they break just about every rule of academic writing.
Have a look at some of these. You may find some things which strike you as disturbingly familiar.
