Pitiful Prose

San Jose State University's annual writing competition recently concluded with a bizarre twist: its winners were recognized for their extraordinarily poor writing.

Named after an author who began his 1830 novel with the famously trite line “It was a dark and stormy night,” the Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest judges writers on how feebly they write the opening line of an imaginary novel. The overall winner clunkily described a screaming contest on a whaler off of Nantucket, but our favorite entry was in the detective genre. The winning sentence in this category came from Eric Rice of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin:

"She walked into my office on legs as long as one of those long-legged birds that you see in Florida the pink ones, not the white ones except that she was standing on both of them, not just one of them, like those birds, the pink ones, and she wasn't wearing pink, but I knew right away that she was trouble, which those birds usually aren't."

The Boston Globe: Screamin' Seafaring Tale Wins Bad Writing Contest

(Photo courtesy h3 six)