The Worst Sentence You Have Read Recently

My wife was reading the Twilight series recently (she's usually a Toni Morrison/Barbara Kingsolver type, so this was amusing) and I leafed through a few pages.

Every sentence was the worst sentence I've read recently.

Incidentally, they all sounded like your example above...is that from Ms. Meyer?

 

"... the seventy six year old man heaved the masterpiece toward himself until it tore from the wall and {character name deleted} collapsed backward in a heap beneath the canvas."

 

apparently, on Mars, despite the forbidding climate, whimsical nihilism flourishes...

 

I can't pick one, but I hate the writing style of fantasy writer Janny Wurts. I think some would like this style, but it really feels forced to me... every single sentence so rich in language.

She makes me feel like my students when they yell at me, "Stop using such big words!" which I can't stand... but I find her over-the-top ridiculous. I think everything she writes gets lost in its own attempt to be great writing.... something like that.

Ok.... I picked one:

"Too pressed to trifle with marking his presence with an image, Luhaine immersed his whole being into the lane's quickened flow, then channeled his awareness through the old energy paths that past Paravian dancers had scribed across the earth to interlink the world's magnetic flux at each solstice."

or maybe....

"Far too methodical for volatile emotion, Luhaine matched effort with Althain's Warden and cast his whole resource into a call to raise the eart's awareness into guard."

Perhaps even...

"Not unlike the consciousness of stone, the balanced mesh of forces which comprised the disparate qualities of bedrock, and rich loam, and the fiery, heartcore of magma danced to their own staid pace."

I mean, seriously... how much of that could a person take?! Perhaps the stories are good, but I can't read her work without rolling my eyes.

 

"It was a dark and stormy night..."

Sounds like a dog wrote it.

 

Maybe most of you know about this, but this thread does remind me of the Bulwer-Lytton contest, which is always hilarious.

It's a contest to write the worst opening sentence to a novel.

So funny. Scott Rice (I believe) has compiled many of the entries in books called It was a Dark and Stormy Night and Son of It was a Dark and Stormy Night. Very funny.

I always forget to enter, but I've had an idea for an entry for years.

 

"Symboligists world-wide would be dazzled."

 

Editor: "Look, Chuck, it was either the best of times or the worst of times, but it can't be both!"

 

In the "Product Placement" category:

McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.

His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

 

There is actually one good novel (A Wrinkle in Time) that uses that as its opening line.

 

On a book report turned in to me:

"You start reading this book and you get into a few chapter [sic] of it and you are very sure of yourself that you know what's going to happen, and then the twits [sic] start to happen and it leaves you guessing for the rest of the book."

Tomorrow we will have a lesson on the use of the word "you" in quality writing...

Then we will have a lesson on the golden rule of repetition of any word in one sentence...

 

This is one of my favorite Onion articles.

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/38586

 

Ive heard of David Goodkind and many people have said that he is a good writer. I will have to buy one of his early books and start from scratch. Which book would you suggest I start with.I too am a fantasy geek but I dont care what people think because if Love it.

 

I know someone who openly told that the Twilight books were the worst things she'd ever read, but could not stop the damned things. My theory is the books are made of crack somehow.

As for her other taste in books. I took a literature class were we had to read both Beloved and the Da Vinci Code. Dan Brown's book were the worst two reading weeks of my life.

 

The marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene is part of the historical record.

That is a quote from a novel, how more boring could it be

 

Virtually every sentence in all 900+ pages of Shantaram; a nonstop exercise in turgid prose. I'll try to find one particular passage, brought to attention by a member of my book club last year when we got together to to console one another after reading it (or trying). By the end of the passage, we were all laughing so hard, tears were in our eyes (it wasn't supposed to be a humorous scene, by the way). The book is utter dogshit.

 

http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/

Here's a contest every year for people to write the worst sentence they can.

 

Yeah, I have bad memories from that book simply because I couldn't get rid of it. Hastings doesn't take mass paperbacks and all the used book stores had enough enough copies that they weren't taking anymore. I finally just left it in my car until I sold it (the car, not the book.) So I essentially had to throw in a car to get rid of it.

 

My contribution in post #4 is from The da Vinci Code. I think it's on the 2nd page. It was the line that insured I wasn't going to ever read that book.


Hard to believe he went to college with David Foster Wallace, and in fact They Were in the Same Creative Writing Class at Amhurst College