People also write without rereading what they've written.

Car Talk mentioned a print ad for a company that makes reference books. The ad read "The only place success comes before preparation is in the dictionary."

(beat)

Grammar and math use the same part of the brain, so if someone tends to not have that organized, logical, rule-happy part working well, they may end up writing like Jackson Pollack painted.

Good writer, and good speaker. I AM snobby towards people with Englisg degrees who are shitty writers. I want to smack them and their alma maters.

Oh, JZ, I would love to see you do that. I would help.

Stephanie, total kudos for you on your goal! Working with a large immigrant population, I totally support you in email. You probably already are aware of National Council of La Raza? They might have some contacts and maybe some grants. I wish I knew more about what you need so I could help. All I do is write letters to my state legislators, sign petitions and help my politically active students. What state are you in? Or, since I'm such a good English teacher, In which state do you live? (IS that stilted or what?)

Yeah, Joe on being one of the Working Masses!

I've edited other people's copy for many years, and PC's example doesn't even begin to plumb the depths of dreadful writing. Try being a lifestyle editor and getting handwritten reports about club meetings or getting employee news from all over the state. A cherished example: "Shakespeare said a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but he never saw our roses here at Plant B." What I don't get is people who can talk and read well, but their writing looks like they had a simultaneous attack of Tourette's and aphasia, mixed with a dash of loss of punctuation.

A sign I've seen in many printers' offices says, "If you're looking for sympathy, it's in the dictionary between shit and suicide."

"Shakespeare said a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but he never saw our roses here at Plant B."

That's...just, oh my.

"If you're looking for sympathy, it's in the dictionary between shit and suicide."

If that's where you're looking, you'll be looking a long, long time.

"Shakespeare said a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but he never saw our roses here at Plant B."

That's...just, oh my.

I'm not seeing what's so awful about that, myself. There are subjects and verbs and a comma in the right place and everything.

Well, it seems to be suggesting that Shakespeare never would have said that if he'd seen the roses at Plant B, which would seem to suggest that those are some foul stank roses; and I'd bet folding money that Boy, do our roses smell foul! was not what the writer meant to say.

Oh. I thought maybe that's what he was trying to say. For whatever reason.

Well, it's possible that's exactly what he meant; it just doesn't sound like something you'd want to brag about in a newsletter. I guess we'll have to wait for Ginger to return and enlighten us.

What he was trying to say was that they'd planted roses in front of the plant, but he became all entangled in a playwright who could not possibly have seen those roses, or smelled them, or called them something else. It's the subset of bad writing in which the person doesn't know what to say, so he uses a quote that frequently has nothing to do with his subject.

eta: My fellow editors and I called that Bartlett's disease.

Oh, Bartlett's Disease, love it.

I particularly enjoy it when people choose one of the trite idiocies that Polonius says to Laertes but use it as "Ooo, Shakespeare wrote this! It's Profound!"