The Return of Assessment Test Sentence gems!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I haven’t posted any of the sentence gems from college placement exams since late 2011, so I thought it was high time to bring them back. (It’s nothing illegal–the students do not own the tests, never get them back, and the college shreds them, so it’s fine. There are also many sentence gems books already in print.)

Anyway, here are some of the latest. Some have nothing wrong grammatically but are amusing or puzzling nonetheless:

Some say it [the Holocaust] was a bad time for the people who were getting killed.

The girls were dancing in their hulasquirts.

We dated for about a year and a half and spent every single day together. We were joined at every section of our bodies.

President Carter had many meetings with the leaders of Egypt, Israel, Gordon, and Phalstine.

The smell of his cologne lingered in the air as if someone in a Febreze commercial was close by.

Life is hard whether we don’t think is not but in reality it is.

Everyone is entitled to their own problems.

People were riding donkeys and cowboy hats.

Not everyone lasts forever.

Thomas Jefferson invented the lightbulb.

Music will never die like a rat in a cat’s mouth.

When you read you can be transformed into a new world that’s beautiful.

Vomit stinks. Even from a pretty girl.

Voteing did not became illegal in some countrys for women yet but in the U.S. it has.
I never knew my father growing up, as do many bastard children these days.
Knitting is a lot like drinking a cool glass of water or reading a Stephen King suspense novel.

Harrison Ford discovered the first building blocks towards inventing the first operating automobile.

Graduation gave me a chance to regain my self-pity.

2

I want this on a tshirt! :smiley:

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It’s not quite Wodehouse, but I’d read that novel.

4

Some good laughs there, indeed. Perhaps I may contribute something from one of my students’ essays. (This is from a student who was already in college, and one one whose general writing skills were actually fairly good. I suppose spellcheck is really to blame. It is from memory, so may not be an exact quote, but it gets the spirit.)

Because paper had not yet been invented, the Greeks had to writhe on waxed boards.

5

One of my favorites, from a lab report. In answering "why do we use immersion oil (in a particular type of microscopy, to help the image be in focus), the student answered:

“To compensate for refractive loss of life (light!).” Damn, tough class where your life is at risk.

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Oh, thanks vivalostwages. I always look forward to these offerings of yours. I used to teach Freshman English at a midwest university and these sentences remind me of how grateful I am that I no longer do that.

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Love 'em!

My favorite sentence from a report this year (third grade) was about a local African-American culture festival. I leaned over the student and murmured, “Honey, ‘funk music’ is spelled with an ‘n’, not a ‘c’.”

8

One of my favorites was in a classroom lesson about metaphor and simile. “The rock was like hitting a brick wall.”

The kicker? It was my high school English teacher!

9

Love those.

When I was in high school I competed for a place at a summer educational camp with the top girls in my graduating class. Part of the competition was an impromptu speech. The subject: The person we admire most. Three girls stood up and proudly proclaimed that Benjamin Franklin invented the light bulb. Two of them also were sure he invented the telephone.

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Glad you’re enjoying them and thanks for the shares!

I’ve got more…

My family traditions have been passed on for millions of years.
Things went down straight up.
I put my pants on and decided to get married.
Her skin was white as paper and red as a tomato.
Writing is a very important and useful hobbit.
I slowed down to an extremely dangerous speed for the freeway.
We are two pees and a pod.
There’s never a day when he doesn’t give up on me.
Over millions of years the economy has changed from getting less than a hundred a week to making thousands a week.
My fear had crept up on me like the smell of bacon in the morning.

The danger I live with will be with me my entire life, a deep slumber in my head that is the feeling of dragging through life with one foot in the grave and a diet Coke in my hand.

I became a nervous meltdown.

When you think you’re in love, it makes you blind and twenty percent stupid.

One fear is having peanut butter stuck to the roof of your mouth.

In this world we are drowning in people who live life like a butter knife.

Some people say love is like pee in the pants. Everyone else can see the outside and may be guessing, but only you know the warmth.

Although money is a vicious thing in life we need, it pays off in the end.

In our society wherever you go theres rules. From walking across the street to stealing a bank.

The word was in from my doctor: I would be officially screwed. Two screws in my left knee is what I was expecting.

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Some of those lines sound like they could be in a Bulwer-Lytton contest entry.

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This right here – this is poetry.

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Stolen, but I don’t know from whom.

14

Substitute a martini for the Diet Coke and this could be me. :smiley:

I trust someone will save this line to use in wedding vows someday. So romantic!

15

And that was probably stolen from somewhere else. I think it was in the early-'90s when I saw a cartoon that said, ‘Doing a good job in this place is like wetting yourself in dark pants. You get a warm feeling, but nobody notices.’

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Well, Fry attributes it to “the blogosphere”, which isn’t really specific enough to track down for sure.

17

I think I saw this in a Peanuts strip with Charlie Brown saying the line.

18

That’s a pretty nice joke. “Doc says I’m going to be screwed” “That sucks” “Nah, I only need two in my knee.” --So maybe I’m not such a good writer, either.

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But it’s funny! :smiley:

And here are a few more for everyone:

My brother was the only male son in the family.

I was taken to New York as a Christmas gift.

Why would you send yourself out to die in another county when you can do that here with your family instead?

I have found my fish, but she’s not just a fish, she’s my whole sea.

I am a normal boy, but I share a special hobbit with other guys.

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I really like this. I could see it on T-shirts or greeting cards or something. It reminds me of “I made a wish, and you came true” which is available in many different formats.