Writers spend much of our time agonizing over this word or that word, grammar and punctuation, all in an attempt to turn out a beautiful piece of work. But there’s a special category of writers who use their talents for a different, you might say evil, reason: to create truly awful writing.

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest celebrates that talent, and I’m pleased to say that Molly Ringle of Seattle, Washington is its 28th grand prize winner with this gem:

“For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss — a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil.”

The contest is the brainchild of the amusing Professor Scott Rice (scroll down and read History of the BLFC at the link above) at San Jose State University. He challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels, paying tribute to the famous “It was a dark and stormy night” opening of the novel Paul Clifford by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton. The line is also plagiarized repeatedly by Snoopy in the Peanuts comics.

The entries can be any length, but most people seem to cram as much detail as possible into as many words as possible. The judges recommend not going beyond 50 or 60 words, but last year’s winner, David McKenzie, managed 88 words.

The one that made me laugh the most out of this year’s winners was the winner of the Purple Prose category, by Scott Davis Jones of Valley Village, California:

“The dark, drafty old house was lopsided and decrepit, leaning in on itself, the way an aging possum carrying a very heavy, overcooked drumstick in his mouth might list to one side if he were also favoring a torn Achilles tendon, assuming possums have them.”

The official deadline each year is April 15, with the winner announced mid-June. But don’t despair; the contest accepts submissions “every day of the livelong year.” If you’ve got a truly awful one to share, send it any time to the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, Department of English, San Jose State University, San Jose, CA 95192-0090, or to srice AT pacbell.net.

Many thanks to my friend Gloria Hildebrandt for reminding me about the contest!

A client called yesterday in a bit of a panic, wondering if I could revise a news release for her by end of day. This is the kind of thing I often refer to as “pulling a rabbit out of a hat.”

I was already juggling a number of projects, but this is a long-time, valued client and I thought it could be done relatively quickly. So I met my other deadlines and then worked late on the “rabbit.”

The very first thing I did was change the lead sentence. By remarkable coincidence, Ragan.com CEO Mark Ragan today posted a link on Twitter on this very topic, pointing to a classic Steve Crescenzo column called “Dumping C.R.A.P. on reporters.”

In it, Steve rants that the “trained monkeys” who write most news releases follow this formula for the lead sentence:

Name of company + everything great about this company that nobody really cares about + bad verb + bad quote by a guy with too many titles.

My client’s release originally began with “Name of company + something great about this company that nobody really cares about” plus that other classic: “today announced” (as if the “announcing” is the news). And took 42 words to say it. The actual news event was in paragraph two.

I rewrote the lead to start with “Employees of [Company]” and link to their involvement in the event that was the “news.” It took only 18 words, and I was able to work in “polar bears,” which you have to admit is pretty awesome. I pushed the “something great about the company” to paragraph three, and included some facts that were relevant to the event.

My client was happy with the result, but I was worried some of the executives might have changed it back. She just called, however, and said they went with the revision. And she appreciated the link to Steve’s column, which gave her a laugh.

The bottom line: With news releases, as with newsletter articles, look for the news and put it up front. Your readers will be more likely to read it, whether they are employees or journalists.

Here’s some more expressive writing.

Love Letter is a public art project in Philadelphia consisting of a series of 50 rooftop murals painted by local and international artists. The project began in August 2009, and is described this way:

The murals, which are best viewed from the Market-Frankford elevated transit line, collectively express a love letter from a guy to a girl, from an artist to his hometown, and from local residents to their West Philadelphia neighborhood. Love Letter, which will be documented in two books, a film, and a gallery exhibition, speaks to all those who have loved and for those who long for a way to express that love to the world around them.

For example, one mural says, “Forever begins when you say yes.” Others say, “Miss you too often not to love you” and “Look look look look any way as long as it’s at me.” (See them all here.)

For writers, it’s a reminder of how the words we choose can say so much.

For the romantic, well, it’s another excuse to admire expressive writing (like Other People’s Love Letters)!

(Thanks to Patti Digh for tweeting about the project!)

Time for a reminder to be careful out there, as we look at some of the recent errors spotted in our imperfect published world (because, of course, I am perfect and never make any myself)*:

…the pictures of the bloggers…don’t wreak of the standard sales pitch (I think it means reek)

…the project would not be aloud to proceed (allowed)

…some sight the figure as high as 41 (cite)

…you can eek out six or eight minutes (eke)

…I don’t want to temp fate (tempt)

…we spend the evening with hot totties (toddies)

…do we tow to a version of that old line (toe).

As I said, be careful out there, and watch out for “spelling by ear,” as wordsmith and columnist Alden Wood used to call it.

*Joke. I do, although I try very hard not to.

Yesterday was a big day for those of you (us) who notice and cringe at signs with extra or missing apostrophes. If people suggest that makes you a nitpicker, tell them you have nothing on former newspaperman Jeff Rubin, the founder of National Punctuation Day.

Jeff started it as a “celebration of the lowly comma, correctly used quotes, and other proper uses of periods, semicolons, and the ever-mysterious ellipsis.”

Lest you think this is trivial, he points out:

“Casual shortcuts bred by e-mailing and text messaging have no place in school papers or professional business writing. In the business world, words have power and help decision-makers form impressions immediately. Careless punctuation mistakes cost time, money, and productivity.”

and

“It’s not the worst thing in the world if people don’t know how to properly use an apostrophe, but it does say something about them: that they don’t care to learn.”

Want some practice wielding your commas and your colons? Head over to E-WRITE’s 76 online opportunities to build your punctuation skills.

Meanwhile, Grammar Girl Mignon Fogarty held a punctuation contest and has been sharing the entries in her newsletter and podcast. For instance, there were heartfelt odes to the semicolon (“I am in love with your very essence, purpose. / You join two sentences, / Which are independent, and make / Them stronger by bringing them together”) and the ellipsis (“I was putting ellipses where a comma would suffice…ellipses when an em dash would do the trick…ellipses when a yadayadayada would convey the same idea.”).

With that, go forth and use it’s in its proper place.

This week I had the shocking experience of having someone Not. Like. My. Work.

I say shocking because I’ve been fortunate. Over about 18 years of running my own business, I’ve been able to submit a first draft of my assignments that’s pretty close to what’s required. There may be a bit of back and forth over some wording, but generally, the client is pleased with what I hand in. I’ve received comments like this from happy customers:

• “You did a good job of capturing the essence of our discussion and the message we were looking to convey.”
• “I am impressed at how you can take a 20-minute conversation and turn it into an understandable article.”
• “I can basically provide you with details for a story and you just run with it.”
• “I am impressed with your skills of listening, selecting the most important information and putting it all together.”

So it was a good reminder to me to stay humble when an article I submitted last week did not fly. The VP who has to approve it did not like it, so I am rewriting it this week. His communications person (who did like the article, fortunately) and I have discussed the areas he flagged as a problem, and one key change that will solve much of them is a new lead sentence/introduction.

What I have learned:

• This reinforces the importance of one of the tactics I use to turn in a close-to-final first draft. That is, to interview key people involved in the topic I am covering, and ask “what do you want employees to take away from reading this article?” I had asked the VP for 10 minutes to talk about his perspective, but he did not have time.
• I could have sent a few questions by e-mail, just to confirm the sensitive areas he wanted to avoid or key areas he wanted to highlight.
• Recognizing that the VP had a new boss, I should have asked about a recent meeting he attended and whether he had commented on the project I was to write about.

I’m starting a new week properly chastened.

Here are more great examples of words eloquently or imaginatively written for the enjoyment of readers:

• “The files holding the data are as thick as unabridged dictionaries.” – Joshua Wolf Shenk in The Atlantic, “What Makes Us Happy?”
• “I’m at home a lot, begging for quiet from a child who has the same need for exercise as an Arabian horse.” – interview with Quinn Cummings on her blog book tour, on Quiet Elegance
• “Big waves were front-page news around here this weekend. We went to the beach to see Mother Nature show her teeth, and though I have lived my entire life in Southern California, I’d never seen waves that breathtaking.” – Danny Evans on his blog, Dad Gone Mad.

Have you seen any great examples to add to my collection?

Woke up this mornin’ (da DA da da)
Sun shiny and bright (da  DA da da)
Finished writin’ my articles (da DA da da)
They were lookin’ tight (da DA da da)
But wait just a minute (da DA da da)
What’s that I see (da DA da da)
A note from Legal, sayin’ “we just don’t agree”!
I got the legal beagle blues, yeah, they get me ev’ry time
Legal don’t want no ’splaining, no, say folks don’t need no bottom line.

Had three employee newsletter articles fall under review by my client’s Legal department in the past week. One article was completely thrown out, or maybe deferred a couple of months. One was cut in half (“eviscerated” is the word that springs to mind) to remove “too much detail.” And I am waiting with only a faint hope that the third makes it, after being revised to take out certain potentially “dangerous” words and references.

Have you ever met a more cautious, seeing-monsters-in-every-corner bunch in your life? No wonder lawyers as a whole (and this is totally an opinion based on observation of every lawyer I have ever known) seem to go grey early.

Everyone can write, can’t they? But it takes real skill to come up with truly awful writing, like that celebrated by the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.

This is almost as much fun as the Oddest Book Title of the Year contest. But instead of just finding existing examples — in this case, that fit the requirement of a bad opening sentence to a novel — entrants are asked to create their own lead to an imaginary novel that thankfully has not seen the light of day.

The contest began in 1982, and “honors the memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton.” He’s the man who gave the world, “It was a dark and stormy night” in the opening to his novel, Paul Clifford.

The winner of the 2009 contest is David McKenzie, a 55-year-old Quality Systems consultant and writer from Federal Way, Washington. Apparently he is a repeat winner, having propelled his awful writing to the top of the Western and Children’s Literature categories before. Oh, yes, there are categories, such as Fantasy Fiction, Detective, Purple Prose and Vile Puns, with winners, runners-up and “dishonorable mentions.” But this year, he won the top prize and all the fame that goes with it.

Here’s his winning entry, in all its 88-word glory:

“Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin’ off Nantucket Sound from the nor’ east and the dogs are howlin’ for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the “Ellie May,” a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin’ and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests.”

Most of the entries are pretty funny. Some are short, but most cram as much detail as possible into a longer sentence, like this winner of the Detective category (Eric Rice):

“She walked into my office on legs as long as one of those long-legged birds that you see in Florida – the pink ones, not the white ones – except that she was standing on both of them, not just one of them, like those birds, the pink ones, and she wasn’t wearing pink, but I knew right away that she was trouble, which those birds usually aren’t.”

I’d better not turn my attention to writing until I’ve cleared my head of these!

I just love finding words eloquently or imaginatively written for the enjoyment of readers. Here are more examples spotted recently:

• “An earthquake will unzipper a fault at two miles per second.” – National Geographic
• “[Sea lions are] a cross between sea slugs and sumo wrestlers.” – Hidden San Francisco & Northern California, by Ray Riegert
• “[Extroverts] are as inscrutable as puppy dogs…They listen for a moment and then go back to barking and yipping.” -  Jonathan Rauch’s “Caring for Your Introvert” in The Atlantic
• “The differences between Web browsing platforms are like the differences between Indian and African elephants, not like those between crabs and eagles. In contrast, email newsletters must contend with platform diversity that is much more like the biodiversity of the Cretaceous Period (before the comet hit).” – Jakob Nielsen in the executive summary of his email newsletter usability study.