Computer Analyst Wins Best Worst Writing Contest

pmadden writes "Dan McKay, a friend from years ago, has won a prestigious literary award. I've enjoyed technical manuals over the years, but never like this. Who would have guessed that such great writing would come from the grad of a small technical school."

Comments

Can it be 'worst' if intentionally so?

[guynorton]

The competition's title should be changed to 'Best parody of bad literature'.

Most of the entries I have read are funny, and intentionally so because they are parodying bad writing. Unless their parody fails in the most abysmal way I dont see how it qualifies as bad prose. For writing to qualify as bad, terrible or 'worst' it should be unwittingly so.

I take issue with the premise of this contest.

[eataTREE]

I never think that very many of the entries really count as bad writing. Consider this year's entry: it's funny as hell! It's entertaining, which bad writing never is. Bad writing is, well, bad: boring, tedious, incoherent. Judging a truly bad writing contest would be a monumental chore. I think the B-L contest is really a "silly writing contest".

Strange Thing About Writing

[Rob Carr]

Of all the engineers and scientists and doctors that I know, all find their writing skills to be far more important than their math skills. They all wind up writing documents to get funds and report findings; most barely use calculus in their jobs and only one uses numerical methods for solving partial differential equations -- and he only uses that in his high power rocketry hobby.

A computer programmer I know wishes he'd skipped his Fortran and Cobol classes for a technical writing class, but that might be damning by faint praise.