THE WORST PIECE OF WRITING IN TODAYS PAPERS
It's a New Year, a new start and time to start with the resolutions.Mine is that I'm no longer going to merely turn the page when confront by some garbled, over-written tosh churned out by broadsheet writers with a negative talent to column space ratio.
So today begins the first "The Worst Piece of Writing in Today's papers" competition. Where I find an offender, I'll post it. Then it's up to you to top it. If, Mirable Dictu, I fail to find some tosh, I'll open a thread and you can document the atrocities.
The rules are.
1. The bad writing can't be in a red top. It never is anyway.
2. Preference will be given to columnists, but leaders, diary stories and features will be considered, as will straight news, but I expect to see few instances of this.
3. Grammar matters, but mixed metaphors, incoherence, over-writing, silly extrapolation from personal experience and other tell tale signs of phoning it in will be valued.
To begin as we mean to go on.
I nominate Zoe William's dreadful opinings on the new edition of This Life in today's Guardian as TWPOWITP. Some poor deluded sould at Guardian online has chosen it as pick of the day. So have I.
It begins "This Life was a TV series which managed to capture the time and atmosphere so totally that, 10 years on, its comeback tonight is event television. Who even knew event television still existed? The show, which lasted for two series in 1996 and 1997, was never particularly funny..." and somehow manages to get worse from there.
Well done Ms Williams, you have won the first ever TWPOWITP prize- unless that is, Eagle eyed readers can beat your effort.
