How to Write Good

How to Write Good

Tortured metaphors are the hallmark of awful writing. They are like the fleas on a dog that's just run through a field...well, you get the idea. That's why it's so much fun to read this horrendous column in today's Boston Gobe by somebody named Derrick Z. Jackson. Thanks to James Taranto's "Best of the Web Today" for bringing it to my attention.

Here's the first paragraph, with emphasis supplied by Taranto:

It is October, and the harvest from the spring's planting of troops remains a grapeless vine, withering into winter compost. Without weapons of mass destruction, Tikrit has given way to Texas, Fallujah is fading into Florida, and the idiocy of another $87 billion for Iraq is rapidly becoming apparent in the latest news from Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa. In the season of pumpkins, Bush is turning into one, with millions of Americans feeling like Cinderella after the ballyhoo of violent, vengeful patriotism. Bush hoped he could sneak back into the White House in 2004 before the clock struck midnight. It is too late.

Overlooked by Taranto, however, is the column's last paragraph, which is almost as ghastly as the first:

Abroad, the harvest is the bitter fruit of more than 300 American soldiers so far. At home, the harvest moon has been obscured by clouds, with wolves creeping around with unemployment slips between their teeth. Americans, finally understanding how they bit themselves, are beginning to bay against Bush.

This poor guy's editors must really hate him. No self-respecting copy editor would let this into a major daily newspaper unless he had a major axe to grind with the author. You might even say that the splinters from these wooden metaphors have lodged in the skin of the readership to the point where they're beginning to cause an infection, and only the tweezers of a good editor could remove them and stop our throbbing pain.