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The Worst Writer
Apr. 20th, 2013 11:07 amApparently Amanda McKittrick Ros is in vogue again for being the worst published novelist in history. Anyway, in the course of reading up on her and other bad 'uns of the era, I came across this quiz which aims to trick the quiz-taker into mistaking lines from the previously acclaimed "worst ever," Bulwer-Lytton (he of "It was a dark and stormy night") with the "genius" Charles Dickens.
I scored 100%. It was a cinch. I didn't read the sentences for meaning, or style, or structure, or elegant effect, or anything like that. I just scanned them and looked at the words being used. Bulwer-Lytton goes for the five-dollar (five-pound?) word every time. "Sequestered hamlet" and "unaccountable inquietude" are BL's fingerprints.
I'm not exactly a fan of Dickens (my favorite of his is Hard Times), but if there's any lesson to be learned from this flawed and rather pointless quiz, it's "don't reach for the thesaurus when words like 'smoke' and 'mud' get the point across."
Take that, Miriel.
Honestly if the quiz had used passages from early Dickens writings it might've been more of a challenge.
I scored 100%. It was a cinch. I didn't read the sentences for meaning, or style, or structure, or elegant effect, or anything like that. I just scanned them and looked at the words being used. Bulwer-Lytton goes for the five-dollar (five-pound?) word every time. "Sequestered hamlet" and "unaccountable inquietude" are BL's fingerprints.
I'm not exactly a fan of Dickens (my favorite of his is Hard Times), but if there's any lesson to be learned from this flawed and rather pointless quiz, it's "don't reach for the thesaurus when words like 'smoke' and 'mud' get the point across."
Take that, Miriel.
Honestly if the quiz had used passages from early Dickens writings it might've been more of a challenge.
