http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2007/s2004031.htm

PM - Monday, 13 August , 2007 18:34:00
Reporter: Mark Colvin

MARK COLVIN: "The fight against bad English is not frivolous", said
George Orwell, who argued that, "the slovenliness of our language
makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts". These days one of
the strongest proponents of Orwell's argument that sloppy writing
breeds sloppy thinking is a man called Denis Dutton.

A professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury in New
Zealand, Denis Dutton is also editor of the website Arts and Letters
Daily, and for some years he ran an extremely successful annual Bad
Writing contest for turgid prose from around the world.

Denis Dutton is in Sydney for tonight's CIS Big Ideas forum, and I
asked him today about his campaign against bad writing.

DENIS DUTTON: I was finally so sick of the awful writing that was
coming out English departments in particular in the 1990s that I
decided to use the Internet to solicit entries in a bad writing
contest. And the rules were that it had to be published writing, that
it had to be published by a university press or a reputable publisher.

turtoni wrote:

Also see: http://www.putlearningfirst.com/language/21plain/wwwrite.html

I could make my argument much longer and therefore more profound, less
susceptible to scrutiny and in accord with the anti-entropy
fundamentalists so that by its very complexity the sentence is seen to
be a positive emergent characteristic albeit unsupported by its own
content, however remaining attractive until deconstructed by a
post-modernist in a sentence ten times longer, as required by the
post-mods, and then become an example of why early forms of
high-complexity failed to evolve because a smarter person less tolerant
of run-on sentences stomped the living shit out him.

See the Monty Python big foot as a moderator of evolution.

On Aug 19, 8:06 pm, pico wrote:

On Mon, 20 Aug 2007 00:40:11 +0000, turtoni wrote:

LOL.. here's one winner...
========================================
Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1786)
Thomas Jefferson

Whereas Almighty God hath created the mind free; that all attempts to
influence it by temporal punishments or burthens, or by civil
incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness...

On Mon, 20 Aug 2007 00:40:11 +0000, turtoni wrote:

Sod off, wanker!!!

ZerkonX wrote:

When I learned English very long sentences, some as long as a couple
pages were common. I can follow very long sentences. I have no problem
whatsoever with them.

However, within the past fifty years it seems that there are no rational
arguments or rational writers who can put together a long sentence with
any cogent qualities whatsoever.

On Aug 19, 8:40 pm, turtoni fastmail.net> wrote:

On Aug 21, 2:41 pm, kevirwin comcast.net> wrote:

On Aug 22, 3:37 am, turtoni fastmail.net> wrote:

On Aug 22, 4:13 am, kevirwin comcast.net> wrote: