Life is Like a Pack of Chewing Gum....

I'm spending some time with my sister and her family. My niece, I'll call her Shortstop, has a lot of fun with her creative writing class. She wrote the following for an assignment where she was asked to write an example of "bad writing." I loved it, and asked her if I could post it here. After a lot of laughter, she consented, so here you go.....

"Life is like a pack of chewing gum. I still haven't figured out why. But I do know that in high school you hoard your gum like a squirrel in the wintertime, because the rest of the kids are like fish when you throw a piece of food in the water. They flock like they can smell the gum from a mile away. Maybe they have huge noses like those strange looking monkeys in the rain forest. I would love to be a monkey. Just playing around, eating bugs off my friends all day. Okay, maybe I wouldn't want to be a monkey, but that can't be the worst thing to be. Personally being the bug would be worse. Could you imagine being eaten? What if the animal forgot to chew and you went down alive? I wonder what the inside of a monkey's body looks like. Well according to Darwin, we evolved from them so their insides probably look like ours. Aren't bodies such weird things? Like toes, what's the point? They just chill in socks and shoes all day and serve no actual purpose. But then again feet would be pretty funny looking without toes, but feet are disgusting either way. You know what else is disgusting. Noses. I don't get it. Our nose runs and our feet smell. Isn't that a little backwards? Just another question of life, I guess. Like why are hot doges in packages of eight and their buns are in packages of ten? Americans are so weird that way. We make everything so hard on ourselves. Like how we use our own measurement system that the rest of the world doesn't. I bet aliens make fun of us. If there are aliens. I think there are, but we don't know that because we're too absorbed in our own lives. There I go again. Dissing Americans. Probably not a good idea, seeing that I am one. But I'm glad I'm not from China or I'd probably be killed for this whole explanation of why life is like a pack of chewing gum...."

If you have ever been around teenagers girls...you might have found that as entertaining as I did. I hope so. Keep writing, Shortstop!

Modern Pentagonese

Kate Bateman, a South Asia analyst at the State Department, has written a wonderful article found in this Month's Proceedings, a journal published by the US Naval Institute. In the article, titled War on (Buzz) Words, Ms Bateman declares, "Bad writing isn't just poor form, it's a national security issue." She's absolutely correct; we allow poor writing to obscure issues, alienate those with whom we need to communicate, and suffocate ideas. Bad writing wastes time and money, and can have a deterimenal impact on communication. And if we have a "failure to communicate" national security policies, goals, and plans to the appropriate people, we could end up with a national security problem. I love the way Ms Bateman introduces her article. She asks her readers to consider this Shakespearean quote from Henry V:

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blod with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

when compared with the same information written in "modern Pentagonese."

The smaller and more agile forces collected here represent a select and elite band of highly motivated warfighters. In the event of adverse battlefield consequences, senior leadership will ensure that participants are suitably recognized in thier next quarterly evaluation. Regardless of the maladaptions of combatants, the current operational environment will leverage their inherent capabilities and capacities and enhance total-force interoperability. Non-participants will regret that they did not have an integrated vision of our potential for full-spectrum dominance.

Proves her point, doesn't it.