Over the next few minutes, read and react to the following paragraph. Does it represent good writing? Why or why not?

It was a crisp and spicy New England morning in early October. The lilacs and laburnums, lit with the glory fires of autumn, hung burning and flashing in the brilliant air, a fairy bridge provided by kind Nature for the wingless wild things that have their homes in the treetops and would visit together. The larch and the pomegranate flung their purple and yellow flames in broad splashes along the slanting westward sweep of the woodland; and the sensuous fragrance of innumerable deciduous flowers rose upon the atmosphere in swoon of incense. Far in the empty sky, a solitary pharynx slept among the empyrean on motionless wing. And everywhere brooded stillness, serenity, and the peace of God. This paragraph is deliberate nonsense. Mark Twain wrote it for a young, pretentious would-be writer to show that what may sound impressive or “artistic” can be meaningless. The paragraph is a spoof and a hoax. Among its problems are

 Lilacs: bloom only in early spring; in fall, the bushes are dusky green  Laburnum: a Eurasian variety of poisonous shrub, not found in the North Temperate Zone of the United States  Wingless wild things: Monkeys? Squirrels? Ostriches? A “bridge” hanging over plants?  Larch: has short, pinelike leaves in bunches, generally a bluish green.  Pomegranates: usually found in hot, arid regions; leaves are bright green, flowers are orange-red, and berries are red. “Purple and yellow”?  Fling a flame: How? Left-handed? In splashes? How do you fling a flame that splashes?  Deciduous flowers: All flowers are deciduous!  Swoon: a fainting fit or attack  Pharynx: the part of the alimentary canal between the mouth and the esophagus. What’s it doing in the sky?  Brood: to dwell continuously and moodily on something. Does serenity brood? Does stillness? "Is it safe out there? Will we ever come back?"

"Sure," I said. "We'll just have to be careful not to step on anybody's stomach and start a fight." I shrugged. "Hell, this clubhouse scene right below us will be almost as bad as the infield. Thousands of raving, stumbling drunks, getting angrier and angrier as they lose more and more money. By midafternoon they'll be guzzling mint juleps with both hands and vomiting on each other between races. The whole place will be jammed with bodies, shoulder to shoulder. It's hard to move around. The aisles will be slick with vomit; people falling down and grabbing at your legs to keep from being stomped. Drunks pissing on themselves in the betting lines. Dropping handfuls of money and fighting to stoop over and pick it up."

He looked so nervous that I laughed. "I'm just kidding," I said. "Don't worry. At the first hint of trouble I'll start Macing everybody I can reach." There once was a monster named Flames. He was a dragon. He had big wings and his teeth were supersonic and he liked to throw people in lava. He smelled disgusting, and he liked to eat Hawaiian people because they’re nice.

Flames didn’t have any friends and when he went to bed at night, he had no dreams because he’s a dragon. Flames’ parents were dragons, too. They were super mean to Flames and they liked to take Flames’ food. And Flames’ favorite thing in the world was to eat people from Hawaii. Flames’ house was a castle, which was very old and dirty and it was so ancient there was lava showing up through the floors. He slept in the tippy-tippy top of the castle, and he didn’t like to go eat people, he liked it when people came to the castle to get eaten. Flames was born from an egg about to fall in lava because it got so close to the edge.

One day a little boy went to see Flames. The boy was named Pleancy, and he wanted Flames to eat him for breakfast. Pleancy loved hot lava, he thought it was so beautiful the way it was orange and hot. He wanted to put some hot lava in a bowl and look at it every night. He was sad that he couldn’t get the bowl of hot lava by himself because it was so hot. Assignment essay tasks are set to assist students to develop mastery of their study subject. Firstly, assignment tasks enhance understandings about subject matter. Yang and Baker (2005) reason that "to master your learning materials and extend your understandings, you need to write about the meanings you gain from your research" (p. 1). Secondly, research (Jinx, 2004; Zapper, 2006) clearly demonstrates that students learn the writing conventions of a subject area while they are researching, reading and writing in their discipline. This activity helps them to "crack the code" of the discipline (Bloggs, 2003, p. 44). Thus, students are learning subject matter and how to write in that disciplinary area by researching and writing assignment essays. At some point during my childhood, my mother made the mistake of taking me to see an orthodontist. It was discovered that I had a rogue tooth that was growing sideways. My mom and I were told that the tooth, if left unchecked, would completely ruin everything in my life and turn me into a horrible, horrible mutant.

Unless I wanted to spend the rest of my natural life chained in a windowless shed to avoid traumatizing the other citizens, I was going to need surgery to remove the tooth.

I was accepting of the idea until I found out that my surgery was scheduled on the same day as my friend's birthday party. My surgery was in the morning and the birthday party wasn't until the late afternoon, but my mom told me that I still probably wouldn't be able to go because I'd need time to recover from my surgery. I asked her if I could go to the party if I was feeling okay. She said yes, but told me that I probably wouldn't be feeling well and to try not to get my hopes up.

But it was too late. I knew that if I could trick my mom into believing that I was feeling okay after my surgery, she'd let me go to my friend's birthday party. All I had to do was find a way to prove that I was completely recovered and ready to party. I began to gather very specific information about the kinds of things that would convince my mom that the surgery had absolutely no effect on me.

I'm pretty sure my mom was just placating me so that I'd leave her alone, but somehow it was determined that the act of running across a park would indeed prove that I was recovered enough to attend the party. And I became completely fixated on that little ray of hope.

I remember sitting in the operating room right before going under, coaching myself for the ten-thousandth time on my post-surgery plan: immediately after regaining even the slightest bit of consciousness, I was going to make my mom drive me to a park and I was going to run across it like a gazelle on steroids. http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/09/party.html President Barack Obama and loyal Democrats once embraced the term Obamacare to sell the American people on health care reform.

Not anymore.

With the president’s approval ratings at record lows, a broken website and Obama under fire for his pledge that people could keep their plans, the “Affordable Care Act” has returned.

The president didn’t say “Obamacare” once during his nearly hourlong news conference last week, while he referred to the “Affordable Care Act” a dozen times. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi went so far as to correct David Gregory on “Meet the Press” Sunday on the proper terminology. And White House talking points distributed to Democrats and obtained by POLITICO repeatedly refer to the Affordable Care Act in suggested sound bites, not Obamacare.

Calling it the Affordable Care Act has advantages for Democrats seeking to defend health care reform while still criticizing the bungled White House rollout. The phrase polls better than Obamacare — and people have responded more positively to the law’s benefits when they haven’t been told they come from Obamacare. In May of 2003 I walked out of the press screening of Vincent Gallo's "The Brown Bunny" at the Cannes Film Festival and was asked by a camera crew what I thought of the film. I said I thought it was the worst film in the history of the festival. That was hyperbole -- I hadn't seen every film in the history of the festival -- but I was still vibrating from one of the most disastrous screenings I had ever attended.

The audience was loud and scornful in its dislike for the movie; hundreds walked out, and many of those who remained only stayed because they wanted to boo. Imagine, I wrote, a film so unendurably boring that when the hero changes into a clean shirt, there is applause. The panel of critics convened by Screen International, the British trade paper, gave the movie the lowest rating in the history of their annual voting.

But then a funny thing happened. Gallo went back into the editing room and cut 26 minutes of his 118-minute film, or almost a fourth of the running time. And in the process he transformed it. The film's form and purpose now emerge from the miasma of the original cut, and are quietly, sadly, effective. It is said that editing is the soul of the cinema; in the case of "The Brown Bunny," it is its salvation. Yesterday, word got out that Lindsay Lohan tried to bail on Scary Movie 5 after she read the script which apparently makes her look like, well, Lindsay Lohan. Except it appears her walking pneumonia magically went away because here she is on set yesterday, but not before a Taco Bell run because that’s something people getting over pneumonia eat. “Does shitting yourself to death keep you hydrated? Because I’ll have a #8.”

Also just for fun, I added the Dr. Phil promo where a visibly drunk off her face Dina Lohan tries to explain how her kids wouldn’t have been better off being raised by wolves that shoot polio out of their eyes.