FOGgies (pt 1)

The FOGgies (2014) are here

I plan to devote the  next few posts (I'm thinking 5 posts x 2 awards , but '...events, dear chap') to my annual awards for outstandingly bad writing. The idea for the name derives from Robert Gunning's FOG index, although these awards don't restrict themselves only to obstacles to readability measured by that index.

Without more ado  (as masters of ceremonies are annoyingly wont to say on these occasions) here are the first two. And, by way of amuse-cervelle, here's a crossword  clue:

Meal that – when digested with vitamin supplement –  results in flatulence. (7)

The award for Most Meaningless String of Abstract Nouns goes to Google for

       Google Analytics iOS Install Campaign Attribution
    Spam

The judges said

This is a real doozy. It guarantees the maximum effort on the part of the reader in return for the minimum effort on the part of the writer. It just grabs a handful of abstract nouns and splurges them out for the reader to make something of if they can, as if saying Well I know what I'm talking about. Get with the program, loser! The writer enhanced the opacity of this string of words by disguising one of their abstract nouns  as a verb. Masterful!

The award for Best Epithet Given Inappropriate Subject Status goes to Judith White for

The unlined walls had exposed four by twos, and a few garden tools hung from nails, with various tins along the beams.  

         The Elusive Language of Ducks

The judges said

The derailing effect of the mis-related verb (what exposed the beams was not the walls but the fact that they weren't lined)  is enhanced by the omission of hyphens from 'four-by-two', so that the reader is seriously challenged in the attempt to make sense of this... [erm ... Is 'sentence' the word?] . The 'garden tools' clause is a brief respite from the meaning-strom, but it lulls the reader into a false sense of calm before the killer punch lands: What are the tins doing? Hanging?

A minority report added

I'm not sure 'had exposed' is a past perfect. Maybe  'exposed four-by-twos' is what the walls had. But this doesn't detract from the other problems – in fact it just adds another level of uncertainty to the mental gymnastics required of the poor reader. 

More anon.

b

Update: 2015:01.09.16:35 – Added this PS

PS We were discussing the Elusive Language of Ducks passage at UsingEnglish.com, and, having made sense of it (after some time and effort) I commented here:

...I've thought further about this, and I gather from the context (and the next page) that it is talking about a shed (though my shed isn't nearly so sturdily built! - I'd guess there were 1.5x1.5s at the corners and 2x1s in the walls) ...

Not so much a garden shed as an out-house.

And that crossword clue: repeats.

---

 Mammon When Vowels Get Together V5.2: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs. Now complete (that is, it covers all vowel pairs –  but there's still stuff to be done with it; an index, perhaps...?) 

And here it is: Digraphs and Diphthongs . The (partial) index has an entry for each vowel pair that can represent each monophthong phoneme. For example AE, EA and EE are by far the most common pairs of vowels used to represent the /i:/ phoneme, but there are eight other possibilities. The index uses colour to give an idea of how common a spelling is, ranging from bright red to represent the most common to pale olive green to represent the least common.

I'm thinking about doing a native iBook version in due course, but for now Mac users can use Kindle's own (free) simulator.

Also available at Amazon: When Vowels Get Together: The paperback.

And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this. 

Freebies (Teaching resources:  nearly 48,200 views  and over 6,500 downloads to date**. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with over 2,400 views and nearly 1,000 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.