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Authors: Tim Cahill
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discussed in a class I was teaching on the techniques (if not the art) of travel writing.
“An initial priority for composition facilitators is to peruse, for context analysis, the local papers, and taking it seriously.”
It was, and remains, the very worst lead sentence I have ever had the misfortune to read, and I remember it to this day, over fifteen years later, word for ghastly word.
Worse, I recall with a shudder the cruelty I visited upon the author, a sincere young woman who was a high school composition teacher, only a few years out of college.
This was at the University of Indiana, and the woman was taking my summer writing class because, she said, my articles on travel and adventure were popular among her students. She intended to absorb my lectures, such as they were, and convey the information to her fellow English teachers. Thus, composition instructors could inspire students to produce assignments modeled, to some degree, after the sorts of articles they preferred to read.
In an initial lecture, I’d said that travel didn’t necessarily involve distance. It was a process of discovery, and could as easily be accomplished in one’s hometown as in the Congo Basin. Where might a potential writer find local travel-writing ideas? Well, there were dozens of them every week in the local newspaper.
It was my first experience teaching writing of any kind, and I amafraid that clemency and compassion were not then among my small arsenal of virtues.
So there I was, standing in front of a class of twenty, all of us holding this woman’s paper as if it had been used some time ago to wrap fish.
“Any comments on this before we start?” I asked. There was a silence so complete it had an odor about it. Something just vaguely sour, if not to say actually putrescent.
And then—degenerate beast that I am—I destroyed this woman, completely, and in public.
“Mr. Jones,” I said. “Could you silently read the opening sentence and tell me what you think it means?” Jones was a retired history professor, and, it was obvious, a brilliant man. I stood at the front of the class, ostentatiously staring at my watch while he read.
Finally Professor Jones said, “I think it means writing teachers ought to read the newspapers.”
“Me, too,” I said. “But it took you forty-five seconds to come to that conclusion. You know why? Because the sentence had to be translated. It is not written in the English language.”
The author sat in stunned silence. She rose slowly, eyes glazed over with what would soon be tears, and commented, quite cogently, I thought, on my teaching technique.
“You … asshole,” she said.
This was something of a surprise since the woman was a lay teacher in a Catholic high school. Then the author of the worst lead sentence I’d ever read turned her back to me and walked toward the door. She was attempting to outrun her tears.
“Wait,” I called. “Please. Let’s talk about this. We want to learn how to communicate effectively with people.”
The unfortunate woman stood in the open doorway, turned her now tear-stained face to me—to the class at large—and said:
“I don’t want to communicate with people. I want to impact on educators.”
With that she slammed the door, hard, and was gone. Exclamation point.
…
I was thinking about this peculiar contretemps recently. In fact, I think about it every month or so, especially when things are going well for me and I am in danger of imagining that I might be an exemplary individual. I think about it more intently when I teach travel-writing seminars, because I always use that hateful sentence as an example of a bad lead.
Now, where I live, in Montana, there is an infestation of writers. In general, those authors on the western side of the Rocky Mountains are associated in one way or another with the University of Montana and its world-class creative-writing program. These men and women generally produce highly literate and
“An initial priority for composition facilitators is to peruse, for context analysis, the local papers, and taking it seriously.”
It was, and remains, the very worst lead sentence I have ever had the misfortune to read, and I remember it to this day, over fifteen years later, word for ghastly word.
Worse, I recall with a shudder the cruelty I visited upon the author, a sincere young woman who was a high school composition teacher, only a few years out of college.
This was at the University of Indiana, and the woman was taking my summer writing class because, she said, my articles on travel and adventure were popular among her students. She intended to absorb my lectures, such as they were, and convey the information to her fellow English teachers. Thus, composition instructors could inspire students to produce assignments modeled, to some degree, after the sorts of articles they preferred to read.
In an initial lecture, I’d said that travel didn’t necessarily involve distance. It was a process of discovery, and could as easily be accomplished in one’s hometown as in the Congo Basin. Where might a potential writer find local travel-writing ideas? Well, there were dozens of them every week in the local newspaper.
It was my first experience teaching writing of any kind, and I amafraid that clemency and compassion were not then among my small arsenal of virtues.
So there I was, standing in front of a class of twenty, all of us holding this woman’s paper as if it had been used some time ago to wrap fish.
“Any comments on this before we start?” I asked. There was a silence so complete it had an odor about it. Something just vaguely sour, if not to say actually putrescent.
And then—degenerate beast that I am—I destroyed this woman, completely, and in public.
“Mr. Jones,” I said. “Could you silently read the opening sentence and tell me what you think it means?” Jones was a retired history professor, and, it was obvious, a brilliant man. I stood at the front of the class, ostentatiously staring at my watch while he read.
Finally Professor Jones said, “I think it means writing teachers ought to read the newspapers.”
“Me, too,” I said. “But it took you forty-five seconds to come to that conclusion. You know why? Because the sentence had to be translated. It is not written in the English language.”
The author sat in stunned silence. She rose slowly, eyes glazed over with what would soon be tears, and commented, quite cogently, I thought, on my teaching technique.
“You … asshole,” she said.
This was something of a surprise since the woman was a lay teacher in a Catholic high school. Then the author of the worst lead sentence I’d ever read turned her back to me and walked toward the door. She was attempting to outrun her tears.
“Wait,” I called. “Please. Let’s talk about this. We want to learn how to communicate effectively with people.”
The unfortunate woman stood in the open doorway, turned her now tear-stained face to me—to the class at large—and said:
“I don’t want to communicate with people. I want to impact on educators.”
With that she slammed the door, hard, and was gone. Exclamation point.
…
I was thinking about this peculiar contretemps recently. In fact, I think about it every month or so, especially when things are going well for me and I am in danger of imagining that I might be an exemplary individual. I think about it more intently when I teach travel-writing seminars, because I always use that hateful sentence as an example of a bad lead.
Now, where I live, in Montana, there is an infestation of writers. In general, those authors on the western side of the Rocky Mountains are associated in one way or another with the University of Montana and its world-class creative-writing program. These men and women generally produce highly literate and
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