How We Are to Be Better Writings

I've found two new ways to have fun laughing at bad writers and their bad editors. The first is someone who tweets under the name @FakeAPStyleBook and offers such usage gems as these:

Avoid using the colloquialism "gonna." EXCEPTION: "You gonna eat the rest of that sandwich?"

Your newsroom is allotted one usage of "Trial of the Century" every ten years. Please choose carefully.

While it's tempting to call them "baristi" because of the Italian roots, the plural of "barista" is "journalism majors."

Dates should be formatted as MM/DD/YY except for the years 1990 through 1992, which should be denoted in "Hammer Time."

You may not say "no one could have suspected..." until you have interviewed everyone on planet Earth.

The other, courtesy of Diane, is a blog called How to Write Badly Well. Here's a typical entry:

Skip blithely between tenses

I sit at my desk with my head in my hands and sighed. It is only three days until the deadline, I think, and I’m going to have had to finished everything before then. If only I have finish this now, I thought and lean back on my chair. Just then, the phone has rung. I am answering it.

‘Hello?’ I am going to have said. It is my boss; he was angry, but not as angry as I remember him being when I am handing in the work late, four days from now.

‘Is this work going to have been finished when it is currently the deadline which, at present, is in the future?’ he demanded. ‘I am planning to have been waiting for it, as I presently am.’

While I'm thinking of it, every now and then I tweet my "Craigslist ad of the day" from the "writing/editing jobs" section of Craigslist. Yesterday it was this:

Looking for a prof reader and editer.

Here are some other doozies I've found:

Publisher Seeking an Editor Wanted.

Editor needed, have to be flute in English, superb with spellings and grammar.

[ad title:] Looking for an Proofreader
[text of ad:] I am a Novelist. I am seeking a experience proofreader.

Comments

[Steve]

'Skip blithely between tenses' reads a lot like my last French composition. Only in English.

[pam]

I wonder if the Craigslist ads are deliberately written badly to play up how much they need proofreaders.

[DJay]

Hi Karen -
Another one like "trial of the century" is "crime of the century". When some Monets were stolen from the Marmottan Museum in Paris in 1985, a spokesperson for the museum said, "This is the crime of the century. It's as though the Mona Lisa had been stolen." In point of fact, the Mona Lisa WAS stolen, in 1911. And returned in 1913.
Obliquely it reminds me of MTV giving out a "Video Clip of the Century" award in 2000. Jelly Roll Morton wasn't in the running.

[Stephanie]

"flute in English?" As opposed to trombones or violins?