Via Tam, a “news” post from an Indiana student newspaper. Said post reads like the writer was coming off a weekend bender, and was stuck between the “I’m so awesome” and “I’m gonna beat you” stages.
Run-on sentences, spelling errors, words that seem to be used to add punch or power to the piece, and a few pronoun association errors occur. This, from a writer for the student newspaper. I thought the student newspaper from my university was bad, but while most of the writing is drivel, it’s readable drivel. (The worst I’ve seen was the opinion piece that said that the tea parties needed to shut up, because we still had freedom… to go to Hooters, get drunk, and watch football. This was from a graduate student… from Vermont. He’s also an African-American.)
All of my writing classes have been taught by professors who held doctorate degrees, and any one of them would cringe at reading this article. As an example of how stringent grading is at my university, of my last two twenty-plus-page writing assignments, one was dead on, and the other had two errors- a spelling error and a pronoun association error in the preface. Both errors deducted two points; make six in twenty pages errors, and you make a “B”. I think my professor would have beaten this student writer with his keyboard for producing such low quality work.
