The Twilight mention reminded me of another recent bestselling series. But you needn’t read it; read Fifty Shades of Tedious Fuckery instead. The summary of the ludicrous plot is studded with a few gems:
Not the worst in the English language, but there’s so much more. And it sold so well…
A friend who majored in psychology and worked counseling sex offenders liked that book. She says she skimmed the sex but that the underlying theme was interesting, and she thought the author got it right – something about a damaged childhood manifesting itself in sexual issues. Well, that’s nothing new, is it? But she thought the author did a realistic job with the characterization.
There’s a long-running science fiction fanzine called Ansible, edited by David Langford, and there’s a long-running column in it called Thog’s Masterclass. It gives bad sentences from various works, mostly science fiction. Langford is particularly fond of inept analogies. Here’s a page of links to those columns:
Or worse: “I can communicate just fine, but I have very little to say so I’m deliberately making it hard to read.”
I’ll take Dan Brown over that bullshit any day. At least Brown (and many of the other authors mentioned here) manage to get their point across immediately. It might be an awkwardly phrased and contradictory description of a shadowy figure, but I don’t have to read his sentence twice to understand what’s going on.
I haven’t read 50 Shades, but have gotten the impression it’s really nothing more than Cinderella in fur-lined handcuffs. (A ‘good’ (‘Good’ because she’s passive) woman manages to land a rich guy.)
Nice if it’s all psychologically-realistic, but…I’m skeptical. (To each his own, of course.)
Defanged Twilight in fur-lined handcuffs, actually; the author had written it up as “Edward and Bella do BDSM” fanfic, then filed off the serial numbers and published it.
Would The Eye Of Argon count?
Here’s a well known one from the political thriller The Overton Window, ostensibly written by alleged author Glenn Beck (et al.). After a dangerous encounter and close escape from whoever is behind the conspiracy, the main character agrees to let the female interest share his bed because she’s so scared, subject to the man’s insistence that she “not do anything sexy.” The woman presses her feet against him, causing him to say:
“Suit yourself, lady. I’m telling you right now, you made the rules, but you’re playing with fire here. I’ve got some rules, too, and rule number one is, don’t tease the panther.”
Yeah, thus my outrage. It did lead to an epiphany, however: prior to that I didn’t quite understand that a good writer was a clear writer, and that my failure to understand an author could be a personal failing, or it could be that the author was a stupid twit.
Well here’s a chance for me to bring forth my late and clearly unlamented Dope thread, “Long Sentences of Gor.”
A sample:
I did not think, really, given the fact that I was here, the presumed methodicality of my arrival in this place, the presumably routine manner of my incarceration, the nature of my cell, or kennel, suggesting that it was not unique, that my presence here would not be its first occupancy nor its last, the unlikelihood that there was anything special about me, the probability that I was only one of several such as myself, that my pleas would move my captors.
Trying here to offer a shred of excuse for the author (maybe more excuse than she deserves): I suspect her “raucous shrieking of the carrion” may be a botched attempt at referring to the bird Corvus corone: a species found in western Europe / Britain, and called in England the carrion crow. Ignorant on the author’s part, not to add the “crow” bit; but she is, perhaps, sorta-kinda trying to make sense.
I doubt it was ignorance of what carrion is, or the full name of the carrion crow (which I’m certain is what the author was referring to), but simply a typographical glitch.
She simply accidentally a word. I do it fairly frequently myself, so if I run across somebody else doing it, I don’t blame them (I usually find it amusing, especially if the lost word changes the meaning of the sentence, like here…occasionally, if I can’t figure out what the missing word is supposed to be, and the sentence is thus rendered nonsensical, I get frustrated, but sympathize with the author).
“At the 1999 National Book Awards ceremony Oprah Winfrey told of calling Toni Morrison to say that she had had to puzzle over many of the latter’s sentences. According to Oprah, Morrison’s reply was ‘That, my dear, is called reading.’ Sorry, my dear Toni, but it’s actually called bad writing.” - B.R. Meyers, “A Reader’s Manifesto”
I once read a Robin Cook novel. All the way through. Just to marvel at the awfulness piled upon awfulness. Dan Brown has a serious rival. Sadly, I cannot recall a sentence and I do not have the book any longer. This was over ten years ago, but I do, however, remember how much my eyes started to hurt after rolling them after every sentence. I thought “rolling your eyes” was a cliche. It’s not. It is a real reaction to shit.
“Ree, brunette and sixteen, with milk skin and abrupt green eyes, stood bare-armed in a fluttering yellowed dress, face to the wind, her cheeks reddening as if smacked and smacked again.”
I know lots of people loved that book, but come on.
Maybe I have a high tolerance for bad writing but many of the others, while mediocre, don’t deserve to be on the list of the worst. But those two are pretty horrible. I guess it’s easy to write truly horrible dialogue.
Given that the sentence in question was from Northanger Abbey, it’s possible that it was supposed to be bad.
I actually laughed out loud over this, which I don’t often do when reading things on the Internet.
My favorite quote from that first post was the one about what the hero was wearing. He walks in, and the heroine thinks “Holy crap! He’s wearing” – well, I’m going to spoiler the rest to give you all a chance to think about what he might be wearing to produce such a reaction.
"Holy crap! He’s wearing a white shirt, open at the collar, and grey flannel pants that hang from his hips."REALLY? :eek:
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that quote grammatically, but unless we’re meant to understand that the heroine is the world’s most easily surprised/impressed woman then it’s not good writing.
Honestly, I’m not sure I agree. In fiction and poetry, there’s definitely a place for the rococo sentence, the difficult twisty mellifluous phrase that slwos the reader down. I’m a big fan of Cormac McCarthy, not despite but in part because of his punctuational idiosyncrasies that make him hard to read.
But that’s fiction and poetry. Nonfiction, especially nonfiction about difficult subjects, generally ought to inform the reader, ought to serve as a master teacher. Occasionally nonfiction can take on an artsy role, of course, but that’s rarer. The quote I offered wasn’t trying to be artsy, it was trying to show off the author’s bigass vocabulary. In that it succeeded, but that’s not a goal I gave a crap about except to hate it.
Sadly, from then on, she referred repeatedly to the carrion. When she walked into a clearing, the carrion took flight. She remembered how the carrion fixed its eyes on her.
She appears to think that “carrion” is simply another word for crow.