Laughing on the Outside, Crying on the Inside

A friend just sent me a link to The University of Chicago Writing Program website. It has a very interesting grammar page, but the toys section is my favorite. The Sentence of the Week offers real-world examples of awful writing and then explains what's wrong with them. The Virtual Academic (who is joined on Fridays by the Virtual Critic) produces random academic sentences that had me shaking my head and laughing out loud. If you're really bored (or just stuck in the middle of your seminar paper, conference talk, dissertation, etc.), try the Make Your Own Academic Sentence page. I suspect that this last little toy may be responsible for producing half of the academic articles that I have recently read.