Writing Exercise: Bad descriptions

[rowyn]

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.

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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.")

Comments

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[rowyn]

Well, I wasn't trying to "write like someone who writes badly". I was just trying to write badly. It didn't have to be authentic as long as it was unpalatable. ;)

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. sandramort keeps a diary for her daughter, princessevabell. And Sandy is scrupulous about using her daughter's own words for the journal -- her daughter dictates, Sandy types. No editing or clean up or "corrections". The difference between that, and one of the journals kept by parents pretending to write for their children is stark. It's fascinating to me, because it's so rare to see genuinely child-like writing.

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[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Fascinating! No, really! =D The thing is, I haven't really been around little kids for a long time; I'd be hard pressed to be "authentic" in replicating what a little kid would say. So often, "parent pretending to type for kid" ends up being a collection of "cute highlights" that sound artificial. The real thing is surreal when you bother to transcribe it. =)

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[rowyn]

I think it'd be cool to read up on research with children and language development and so forth. Find out how to write a convincing kid's dialogue. Though I wonder if that isn't something that's changed over the years? Do modern kids have the same relative speech habits as kids a hundred or a thousand years ago? Hmm.

[zaimoni.livejournal.com]

Speech habits may change, but the typical development of reasoning techniques is almost certainly more stable. Piaget did some foundational work in the 1960's, which was expanded upon by later researchers.

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[rowyn]

I'm thinking of it from an author's perspective. If I'm writing a story set in Victorian England, how would a child talk? What would Oliver Twist really have sounded like?

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?

[zaimoni.livejournal.com]

I'd say intensiveness of education is important. Keep in mind that "modern" (roughly, post-1970 as contrasted with pre-1920) U.S. education is not nearly as efficient at imparting facts as anything overseas. At our best, we teach students how to learn on their own...and we usually try, at least. So I'd be trying to get modern samples from all of the U.S., U.K., and Australia.

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.

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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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[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Well, you succeeded, in the sense of writing badly. ('gryn) Writing like a bad writer is a whole different subject.

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[rowyn]

Yay! I did it! Now I won't have to try to do it AGAIN. :)