West Chester University Student Wins Grammar Grump’s Crappy Writing Award

In today’s lesson, boys and girls, the Grammar Grump will attempt to teach you how not to write like an Arschloch. The best way to do that is by example. So here’s an example of “writing” so incontrovertibly bad that it wins the first leg of the Grammar Grump’s Crappy Writing Award. Before we begin with the dissection, however, we should thank The Quad, West Chester University’s student newspaper, for coughing up this instructive hairball.

We are not revealing the “writer’s” name out of consideration for his parents’ feelings. Besides there were many other worthy examples of Beschissen writing in The Quad. We were especially dumbfounded by a piece entitled “West Chester Police controversy and global feminism.” Jesus H. Christ, give us a break. And now, we murder to dissect.

“The beginning of each fall semester marks a turning point in our college experience. As autumn flaunts its turning colors, we too are left to reflect on our own. We’re free to mull over past loves, flourishing passions and the stale musk of repressed dread for post-graduate life. With the changing of the seasons comes a change in our cravings. In the air, subtle wafts of yearning penetrate a tame — yet vibrant — backdrop of pumpkin-spiced hayrides and cinnamon-scented frollicks through orchards of waning green and burgeoning orange. We’ve patiently waited while yet another of our increasingly long summers draw to a close and with that, an air crisper than ever fills our lungs.”

Oh, bump me. Where to begin? Should I even begin? I’d sooner smoke a full-gram cart of street-quality Dank in one sitting than contend with all that “stale musk of repressed dread” and all those “pumpkin-spiced hayrides and cinnamon-scented frollicks [sic] through orchards of waning green and burgeoning orange.”

The Grammar Grump has frolicked through many an orchard in his day, but none smelled like cinnamon, boys and girls, and he’s here to tell you that this sort of “writing” will make you smell like a strutting, vainglorious, popinjay with a taste for pretension and cliché.