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Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Bad Writing Award



The reasons bad writing is bad are seldom mysterious and often the same, from bad writer to bad writer.

Here, Andrew Sullivan explains why he ignores the unreadably dull New York Times columnist, Bob Herbert.

Note how similar Sullivan's list of bad stuff is to the things Scathing Online Schoolmarm's always saying:


[O]nce I know the topic of a Herbert column, I can predict every single self-satisfied, self-righteous platitude that is about to come. He's also a terrible writer - there's no character to his prose, never a felicitous turn of phrase. He's the kind of columnist who gets journalism awards. Even when he's right he's so insufferably self-righteous and humorless it's a pain to read him. So I don't.