I realize that I could collect examples of bad English from the Federal Register all day long and that doing so is as challenging as picking a fight with six-year-olds, but this sentence from the Department of Education’s Charter School Program stands out:
The purpose of the CSP is to increase national understanding of the charter school model and to expand the number of high-quality charter schools available to students across the Nation by providing financial assistance for the planning, program design, and initial implementation of charter schools, and to evaluate the effects of charter schools, including their effects on students, student academic achievement, staff, and parents.
Whew! For an extra challenge, diagram the sentence, with all its subordinate and nested clauses. Stanley Fish finds similar problems in an education report and sees bureaucrat speak as the problem:
In this case the bad writing takes two forms. First, there are the sentences made up of empty abstractions linked together in an awkward and strained syntax: “The goal is to magnetize lost talent and ensure that students thrive and progress, in order to create new generations of innovators who will enable New York State to continue as one of the world’s idea capitals.” And there are the sentences that actually say something, but in a prose so clotted and bureaucratic that it takes several readings to figure out what it is […]
A good description of many Requests for Proposals (RFPs)!
Posts such as this might become an occasional series, like the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which is “a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels.” Sample loser/winner: “Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you’ve had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean.”
(And yes, the title of this post is intentional.)