[etni] The bad metaphors are real; the students aren't
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- Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2011 14:30:02 +0200
The bad metaphors are real; the students aren't
CNN - January 31, 2011
It's an internet hit as classic as that book by a British guy you were
supposed to read in eighth grade but didn't.
A hilarious list of clunky writing passages -- ostensibly created by
teachers compiling their students' greatest misses -- has been around
for years, but seems to have gotten new life recently on Facebook and
Twitter.
To be sure, the lists are full of howlers.
I mean, who can resist similes like this: "Her face was a perfect
oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a
ThighMaster."
Or gems like this: "John and Mary had never met. They were like two
hummingbirds who had also never met." And, finally: "She grew on him
like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature Canadian
beef."
But if some of the hilarity seems too good to be true, that's because it is.
The lines are real. But they were written by grown-ups trying to be
funny, not kids accidentally saying the darnedest things.
The quotes that populate most of the links (generally to various
blogs) actually come from the Washington Post's "Style Invitational,"
a long-running writers forum.
(To read the whole article, go to -
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/web/01/28/bad.student.writing/index.html
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