It Was a Dark And Stormy Night ...

Wretched Writing is organized along quasi-encyclopediclines, from “adjectives, excessive use of” to “zoological sexual encounters, politician-writers and” (more on this later). Other entries include “art writing, inartistic (and often incomprehensible),” “dialogue, deadly unromantic,” “impossibilities,” “legalese,” “overwrought writing about minor things,” “prose, preposterously Proustian,” “‘said’ synonyms” (enough to drive the late Elmore Leonard to despair), “thesaurus addiction,” and “words, wrong.” There are also headings under which the Petrases collect unintentionally funny snippets from writers dead and gone. I should mention that I did not much care for these. Poor Jane Austen: how could she have foreseen the changes in denotation that would make a straightforward description of her heroine, young Catherine Morland, who at age 15 “began to curl her hair and long for balls,” ridiculous? And surely Bram Stoker should not be taken to task for writing, in 1897, that “Dr. Van Helsing rushed into the room, ejaculating furiously,”