Writing Exercise: Bad descriptions
Feb. 12th, 2004 10:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rowyn![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
level_head said to me that my "writing badly" exercises so far have all been well-written, and accordingly, he was not convinced that writing badly was something I was even capable of. I'm doing these exercises all wrong! *cries* ;_;And this is my last chance! So I'm going to do my very best ... er ... very worst on this one. The genre is "badly written @descs".
You are looking at a human. She is a womn. She is bloned. Her hair iss long. It is over her ears. She is long-legd. She is short. She is very thin. She is big-chestde. She is browne-eyd. Her eys are ey-shaped. Heer face is angular. She is very tall. She has a mouth. She has two lisp. Her cheeks are round. Shee is white-skinned, except where she is tan. She is clothed. In clothing. She is curvey. You arr thinking she is very very very beutifull. You are seen by her. You are being smiled t by her. She is very very very beutifull. HEr mouth is red. She is black-haired. Her teeth are whit. Her feet are smaell. Her fet are in high-HEeled sandals. Her breasts are big. There is desire in you to have sex wth her. Her thigh-high boots are sexy. She is VERY VERY VERy SExy. You are very very very much in love with her. She is aaverage hite.
All right. I hope the above satisfies everyone that I can write badly, because I don't think I can do much more of that.
(I was originally going to do a desc with run-on sentences and misspellings, inaccurately-used big words, lots more reader-hijacking, etc. But I thought that would probably be too entertaining to qualify as authentically "bad". Plus, I don't think I could come up with a reader-hijacking better than Chip Unicorn's "Upon seeing this character, you immediately perform three bank robberies, give your ill-gotten gains to the Libertarian Party, then work as an Elvis impersonator in Vegas.")
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no subject
Date: 2004-02-12 08:26 am (UTC)Re:
Date: 2004-02-12 09:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-12 08:31 am (UTC)Re:
Date: 2004-02-12 09:33 am (UTC)Maybe it was, since later on she's black-haired. Or does that mean she got blackened? :)
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Date: 2004-02-12 10:18 am (UTC)===|==============/ Level Head
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Date: 2004-02-12 01:08 pm (UTC)CYa!
Mako
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Date: 2004-02-12 03:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-12 08:40 am (UTC)And so forth.
I think it's probably ultimately easier to convincingly do "kiddie drawings" than what you're trying to do, because, in theory, we can think back to what our own "artwork" was like as a little kid, and what went through our heads at that time. (At least, I was pretty intent on it, and I have some vague recollections of the process.)
It's probably a little harder to convincingly do a "bad @desc" unless you were ever in that category yourself. I suppose that examples always help. I suppose that if I hung around in "West Corner of the Park", I would see plenty. ;)
But ... you know, now you have me curious as to what you were originally going to do. So, it was going to be too entertaining? I'm greedy. Entertain us! ;D
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Date: 2004-02-12 09:40 am (UTC)But your comments on drawing like a kid remind me of my observations on the way people try to "write like a kid". Authors who do kid-dialogue almost invariably get it wrong.
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Date: 2004-02-12 10:16 am (UTC)Re:
Date: 2004-02-12 03:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-12 06:52 pm (UTC)Re:
Date: 2004-02-13 06:48 am (UTC)Of course, I doubt that there's any accurate record of such things -- it's hard to find accurate records on the speech of modern children. :) But if, say, I took the speech pattern of an adult from Victorian England, and the developmental speech habits of a modern child, could I accurately extrapolate what a Victorian child sounded like? Or would societal conventions (eg, "Seen and not heard") be more of an influence on dialogue than the actual development process?
no subject
Date: 2004-02-13 08:13 am (UTC)Take Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows, for instance. [Ok, so I used to be a slightly fanatic collector -- I own hardcopy of every edition that was in print in early 1992. Ernest Shepard's classic illustrations of Mr. Badger are a formative influence on how I draw my LJ icons.]
That is a redacted collection of bedtime stories for Kenneth Grahame's son, at age 10 or so. That 10-year-old son had an intensive enough education (in English) that those were suitable bedtime stories. The vocabulary's over most U.S. college freshmen's heads.
The difference between U.S. and overseas education really shows in the later parts of higher education (graduate school, junior and higher undergraduate).
While this isn't on my userinfo (I don't want to have lazy freshmen swamping me), I have provided tutoring services in both higher math and higher computer science for overseas students. To put things mildly, that overseas bachelor's degree confers excellent factual awareness (better than a corresponding U.S. degree) -- but self-learning skills are deficient compared to most U.S. high school students.
One template exercise, with extensive commentary on how I thought about the exercise, was sufficient for said student (one Pakistani, one probable subcontinental Indian) to work an entire category of loosely related exercises. But they were not trained in how to induct that template from the category of related exercises. It just wasn't taught overseas. I provided the missing link between what overseas education provided and what they were actually getting, but we never made serious progress towards not needing me as an education-system translator.
In contrast, one grey-haired acquaintance of mine at K-State (trying to go for a mechanical engineering degree; he had dropped out of high school in the early 1950's with a D average GPA) needed less than 10 hours of tutoring to ditch me as a tutor for Ordinary Differential Equations. [This is a good thing. I taught him how to analyze the subject matter for study.]
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Date: 2004-02-12 10:24 am (UTC)Re:
Date: 2004-02-12 03:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-12 08:43 am (UTC)And you know what? It occurred to me the other day ... that I rarely ever headline in conversation! Augh! Sometimes I even lose my point before I ever get to it, because I spend so much time "building up" to it. I must mend my ways! =P
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Date: 2004-02-12 09:42 am (UTC)But it's an interesting idea, trying to give your point up front when you're talking. Hmm.
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Date: 2004-02-12 09:52 am (UTC)But if, for instance, I'm trying to ask my supervisor if I can leave early, I really should get to the point first, rather than beating around the bush.
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Date: 2004-02-12 10:23 am (UTC)('gryn)
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Date: 2004-02-12 03:10 pm (UTC)Re:
Date: 2004-02-12 11:00 am (UTC)And that was for descriptions, not conversations. Conversations meander.
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Date: 2004-02-12 11:08 am (UTC)Re:
Date: 2004-02-12 12:21 pm (UTC)Re:
Date: 2004-02-12 12:50 pm (UTC)I remember getting it from BBC News, but I can't find the original picture any more.
It's my 'isn't this KY000000TE' picture.
no subject
Date: 2004-02-12 11:19 am (UTC)I know you were trying to write badly without intentionally being funny, but... I'm sorry, that still made me laugh.
Or perhaps it's just me. Does that make me funny because I thought it was funny? ;-)
Darnit!
Date: 2004-02-12 12:05 pm (UTC)Um, wait ...
[I kept laughing while I was writing this myself, actually. I'm almost disappointed noone commented on the character's Incredible Changing Height. :) ]
no subject
Date: 2004-02-12 12:40 pm (UTC)You know, I didn't catch that part until you brought my attention to it. :-P
I also liked how the "very beautifuls" and "very sexys" starting adding up as you went along. ;-)
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Date: 2004-02-12 04:26 pm (UTC)no subject
"She is very thin...She is big-chestde. [...] over her ears."
Unfortunately, after reading that bit wrong, I was laughing so hard, the rest of it all is just a blur.
That WOULD be a big chest!
Date: 2004-02-12 12:03 pm (UTC)Re:
Date: 2004-02-12 12:22 pm (UTC)Re:
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Date: 2004-02-12 04:14 pm (UTC)Re:
I gather that he drew a series of female characters who... Let me put it another way...
In medical terminology, the suffix -itis, refers to a swelling of tissue. Appendicitis refers to a swelling of the appendix. Meningitis refers to the swelling of the meninges of the brain. Encephilitis refers to the swelling of the head and so on.
Alstonitis refers to... umm... er... ah... swelling of certain female mammalian tissues to unrealistic proportions, possibly by helium or other lighter than air technology.
Umm... Think of the airships of Sinai.
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Date: 2004-02-12 09:22 pm (UTC)Re:
Date: 2004-02-13 06:49 am (UTC)I'm familiar with the syndrome. I even read Polymer City Chronicles. ;)
no subject
Date: 2004-02-12 02:13 pm (UTC)I'm still wondering how a sense of desire can look at me.
no subject
Date: 2004-02-12 04:09 pm (UTC)Re:
Date: 2004-02-12 03:56 pm (UTC)Heehee! I think when you use repetition and the passive voice, it comes out better, though. ;)