Attention Harvard Coop: Go Fuck Yourself.

So. I've been in a school for less than two months and already I hate the Coop. I'm not talking dislike. I'm not talking detest. I'm not even talking loathe. This is out-and-out hate. I hate it like a fat kid hates running. I hate it like Eli hates women. I hate it like I hate myself.

To those not at all familiar with the Harvard Coop, I'm tempted to just say, "Stop reading here. Go on with your lives, however blissful or wretched they may be, and spare yourself the unrivaled agony of a close, intimate relationship with the ungodly scourge that is the Harvard Coop." But I'm not actually going to say that. What you just read never happened.

A little background:

The Harvard Coop was established in the mid-1940s by a group of enterprising undergraduates with a fund donated by a short, mustachioed fellow by the name of Albert Wiefshaufel. It is a well-documented but aggressively-concealed fact that the Wiefshaufel clan drew their wealth from several highly-successful retail outlets in Berlin, all of which were expropriated from Jews in the late '30s after the institution of the Nuremberg Laws. To this day Harvard tours will still cite Wiefshaufel as one of the university's greatest benefactors and philanthropists, known equally for his (and I quote directly here) "generous character and eccentric mannerisms," which I'm quite certain included screaming anti-Semitic propaganda in public places and kicking handicapped people in the face.

The Coop's original intention was, ostensibly, to form a co-operative between the Harvard administration and the students, rooted in the unshakable and time-honored union of mutual economic gain. The real reason, however, was to disenfranchise all students of 'unmeritorious' descent by way of monopolizing the academic textbook market. In the beginning the Coop required all students register individually for their services; those deemed unfit for the college had their files marked with a Y. This is actually the origin of the Harvard slang term, "Y-listed," which is the pejorative term for rejected applicants to the college, the implication being that these students had to go to Yale. In reality, however, the Coop files were marked with a Y because the letter J in the German "Juden" is pronounced like the English "y," and those marking the files thought this was both a clever, discreet, and tasteful reference to the Nazi ostracization, oppression, and subsequent slaughter of Europe's Jewish population.

The original Y-listed students faced a much more severe consequence than going to Harvard's bitch school. All of the textbooks and academic supplies at the Coop were officially marked-up anywhere from one hundred to six hundred per cent; those students deemed "meritorious" were given "discounts" that let them pay the actual market price, while the Y-listed ones were forced to pay outrageous fees for the same materials. As there was a distinct correlation between economic status and ethnic "merit," most of the Y-listed students could not afford the assigned books, forcing them to use the scarce, out-of-date materials available in the university libraries, or, more often, to endure the stigma and humiliation (not to mention inconvenience) of living off the charity of their classmates. Those rare Y-listed students who could afford the textbooks were often sabotaged in their attempts to get them--when requested they would be reported as out of stock, or back-ordered, or lost in transit. The result was that Y-listed students faced an enormous disadvantage, both socially and in the classroom, and many either performed poorly or were forced to withdraw from the college.

Naturally, this unspoken system of disenfranchisement could not remain secret for long. Eventually Y-listed students caught on and brought complaints to the administration. The administration, however, responded with all the indifference a well-trained bureaucracy can muster. Remember: this is the same administration that invented the "extracurricular" component of the application process because going by test scores alone resulted in disproportionately high numbers of Jewish students. 'Meritocracy' in American universities, as we know it today, was actually born of antisemitism.

[As a side note: Isn't it crazy to think that maybe the reason you're really taking that boring internship or playing the cello or doing all that community service is actually to give your top-choice school some reason to accept you over someone who would make a more competent student but is undesirable for a reason that has nothing to do with extracurriculars at all? Isn't it crazy to think that "extracurriculars" once actually meant "race," "religion," or "parent's profession," and for all we really know, it still does? What happens in that admissions conference room stays in that admissions conference room. They can reject you because they don't like your face, and don't think for a minute that they're too principled to do so.]

The situation remained unchanged for nearly two decades, until finally a group of undergraduate students with some modicum of decency and social conscience managed to quietly but effectively reform the Coop into the different brand of monstrosity that the world faces today.

I think it would be grossly insensitive to all those formerly slighted ethnic groups to say that the situation has not improved much. From their perspective it most certainly has. Harvard now prides itself on having its number of white and black students proportional to national population statistics; it is also loath to mention that, although Latino students are underrepresented to the point where students in Spanish classes regularly ask, "So who speaks this language, anyway?", Asian-American students are overrepresented by about 400%. Which just goes to show that maintaining proportionality is only a validating exercise when applied to the important races. Right, Ivies?

Notice how I didn't mention Jews at all in that last paragraph (for once!). That's because Harvard, just like most colleges, likes to avoid publishing those numbers. It's a real sore spot. Also note how on the Common Application there is a section that asks you to define yourself racially, but none that asks you to identify yourself religiously. Maybe the reasoning behind this is that the color of your skin tells an admissions officer much more about a student's character than a self-selected core belief system ever could. Who could argue with that? Only an insensitive jerk!

But I'm digressing. Unlike Eli, I don't like to hold grudges against people or organizations after they've made a concerted effort to make amends for their wrongful past acts. And nobody now is expropriating or disenfranchising students from the shady lofts of the Coop.

OR ARE THEY?

Well, no. They're not. But what they're doing is still despicable. See, the first thing with which every Harvard student is confronted when he enters this putrid glass building is a room filled, from floor to ceiling, with Harvard multicolored paraphernalia. Hats, sweatshirts, pants, shirts, ties, condoms, socks, female condoms, jackets, ribbed condoms, cufflinks...it's like a psychedelic Harvard madhouse. The last time I went in there I was tripping on acid and I ended up kicking over clothes racks and crying with my fists in my ears. To shut out the voices.

Ever see that movie where Robin Williams works as a film developer and grows obsessed with the pictures of families who entrust him with their pictures? Neither did I. But at one point I understand he covers this whole wall with pictures of people he doesn't even know, and then blood starts pouring out of all sorts of weird places and shit starts exploding. That's basically what the bottom floor of the Harvard Coop is like: Robin Williams being creepy. Only he's doing it on Fox News in front of a video background of jingoistic iconography, like the Zapruder Film interposed with shots from 300 and old sepia-colored pictures of Lincoln and Ty Cobb, set to the music they play on ESPN when an American golfer wins a tournament in Scotland.

Up a half flight of stairs is where they keep all those dark-eyed sixty-dollar teddy bears wearing tiny Harvard shirts. And these nighttime cuddlemuffins are flanked on both sides by wonderful bedtime story books, such as, "How They Got In: Secrets to Harvard Admission" or "50 Successful Harvard Application Essays," or, my personal favorite, "Great Expectations: How to Raise Your Child to Resent You and Develop Borderline Personality Disorder."

It all just goes to show that you can be as exclusive and as elitist as you want and still get people to pay to eat shit right out of your ass.

The next floor--if you can make it that far, and if so, wow--is filled with outrageously priced school and dorm supplies. One does not linger here.

The third floor is the where you finally get to the books. Or, you find the shelves where the books are supposed to be. See, the Coop never actually stocks enough. For a class of twelve, the math geniuses in the back room will order seven books. For a class of 172, they'll order eight. They once ordered nine books for one class, but only because someone wrote a six upside down. The class had 800 people.

Once you find the empty space on the shelf where you're book is supposed to be, you'll either see a sign that says the books are out of stock, or a sign that says they, mysteriously enough, aren't. In the case of the former, you go to the desk, stand in line for twenty minutes, and fill out a form, just so you can order a book that the Coop should already have and would be cheaper and faster to buy on Amazon, but is probably unavailable because it was published by the Harvard University Press two days ago. In the case of the latter, you're charge is to sneak around the corridors and try to find one of the employees with the red tags on their necks, who behave very much like a cross between those giant ogres before the Forest Temple in The Ocarina of Time (in that if they see you, they'll whip out a giant cudgel and send a shock wave that will blow you off your feet into a wall), and the monkey in the Tall Tall Mountain level from Mario 64 (in that they're unreasonably fast and will just make false promises and steal your hat if you ever manage to grab them).

If you're really clever you're probably thinking, "Well, gee mister, why don't you just copy down the IBSN from the books and run a search on Google! That'll solve all your problems." And you know what? For once you'd be right. Only if the Coop catches you doing that, they will actually call the cops on you. I've seen it happen. The poor student saw the boys in blue coming for him and bolted down the back stairwell. He made it to the ground floor but became disoriented by the bright colors and fainted, throwing up all over himself. The cops beat him with billy-clubs until all the blood was drained from his flesh. Behind the carnage I saw a Coop employee mark a tally on the wall. "Four-hundred!" she screamed, and laughed...and laughed...and laughed...

My Harvard Application Essay

After I was accepted to every school in the world anyone in the world could ever want to go to, ever, a lot of people asked me, not knowing my name wasn't actually Ted, "Hey, Ted, what do you think got you in?" To which I would sagely reply, "It is not necessary for speech to come from the tongue." Most people would be sort of intimidated by that response because they figured I was so smart, and they'd stop and think about it as if it contained all the answers they sought, but the truth is I was just being weird. Looking back I guess that's sort of how Jesus or Bob Dylan must have felt before they jumped the shark and got crucified.

The truth is, though, I actually know what got me into Harvard. It was my essay. They even wrote me back and said, "Ted, we don't really like you and we don't think you'll be a very good student, but your essay was one of the best we read this year." Actually, they didn't really write those first seventeen words--only the last eleven. But the rest was implied.

So I've decided, since people have asked me in the past, and I miss those people, since I guess most of them are dead by now, that I'll put up my winning essay. So without further ado, this is what it takes to get you into Harvard:

In response to the prompt, "Describe a fictional character, historical figure, or creative work (art, music, science, etc.) that’s influenced you and explain that influence."

Toast, by Tim Lambert

If I could do any one thing in my life—anything—I would be a space dolphin hunter.

Why? I hate dolphins. They're trash to me. They're scum. And everyone knows that by the time I'm out of college—about nine years from now—they will be in space…lurking in the darkness.

And someone's gonna have to kill 'em.

When I was just a wee little boy I watched my first Crocodile Dundee movie, and it changed my life forever. When I saw ol' Mick Dundee dive into that river and come out with the carcass of a ten foot lizard slung over his back, I knew what I was meant to do. I would dream at night about sharpening knives on the ice caps of Nepal, in frantic search of the Yeti. I figured since it was so elusive, it must have done something it was ashamed of. And when a Yeti is ashamed, you know shit has really gone down.

Anyway, I basically just killed stuff. All the time. For looking at me funny, and for having no souls.

Someone once called me a sociopath. She had a degree in psychology. But if she was so smart, how come she's dead now? Huh? The answer is she's stupid.

But space dolphins aren't stupid. They're cunning bastards, and it takes a truly sharp human intellect to trace them through the vacuum of space. But I figure that won't be a problem, since I aced two of the sections on the SATs.

So back in the jungle, I was wading through a river dyed red with my blood, draining rapidly out of an inch-wide gash circling my abdomen like a hoola hoop. I knew I wouldn't make it much longer if I didn't make it to the helipad by the time the sun hit the jewel of the monkey idol I had placed at the top of the Incan ruins. For the first time in my life I stopped to consider what I was still living for. What was there? Another endless line of vacuous monsters just waiting to be made into corpses. It was the same grind, over and over. Couldn't there be something more to life? Shouldn't there be? What had happened to those high-minded dreams of meaning and morality that I had held so dear long ago?

But just then my bullshit was cut short by a huge fireball that broke through the canopy and landed on the bank behind me and exploded. I was knocked face first into the water before I could even manage to take a breath. I lay below the rippling surface for nearly a full minute before finally collecting my senses and pushing off the muck below. But as I rose slowly from the deep, having been pushed into the center of the river, I felt something cold as death itself slide against my leg.

Dolphin.

Fast forward to space. I'm floating around in a strange embryonic sack of fluid that the government assures me will keep my alive for up to six years in the void. I don't plan to take that long. Five hours before I made a near-fatal mistake by wandering into the den of the space dolphins in the midst of a spontaneous orgy. I only managed to escape after having my left leg severed by one particularly raucous female.

The sack has started its slow process of rebuilding my leg, but I've taken the severed one for my own purposes. For the past three hours now I've been pulling away the skin and muscle fiber. My femur will make an excellent cudgel—and I know who my first target will be. That horny dolphin she-bitch-slut.

I take a break for breakfast. It was here that I first found solace in toast.

I was the first person in the history of my school to come out as toastsexual. I'll never forget the first day after I broke the news. I only told a few friends, but word spread overnight. In my first class, during a test, a boy behind me made toaster noises. Everyone laughed at my expense. Then in the cafeteria I went to buy some milk and one of the lunch ladies threw a fork through my eyelid and farted aggressively. I found out later that she was actually having a psychotic breakdown, but at the time I took it really personally. I went outside to eat under the dock, alone with my toast.

At least, I thought I was alone. I was almost finished when a dolphin walked out of the ocean, dragging what I estimated to be several thousand of those giant barbed things that were all over the Normandy beaches in the D-Day scene of Saving Private Ryan. She glared at me, and made a noise that sounded like "Blomph."

Several minutes after killing it, I went back and talked to my toast. Being the cold-hearted killer that I was, I didn't know if it would work out between me and this warm, exquisitely golden-brown beauty freckled with raspberry jam. Toast said toast understood, and told me toast had known for a long time that I loved killing more than toast. Toast only wished toast could satisfy me in the same way killing did. I said, "Toast, you gave me the only satisfaction a man should need. It's just that I ain't yet what a man should be." Toast laughed in that sweet, crusty little way it always did, and then offered itself unto me. I ate it without remorse, but not a day goes by now that I don't think: what if?

If there's anything I've learned from killing dolphins it's that love can be a funny thing.

Dramamine, Zealotry, and the American Dream

Sometimes when I'm alone I think about things really hard and then I get a headache and throw up on my shirt and subsequently the rest of my self. But then I eat a bunch of Dramamine and feel better. Recently though this hasn't been working nearly as well as the movies and the media and Modest Mouse in that one song said that it would. So I've come to a crossroads: either I can find more powerful drugs, which probably won't be available over the counter and will demand shady ventures out into the pit of Harvard Square where all the winos and dirty kids with bad haircuts hang out, or to stop thinking so hard. I've decided to stop thinking so hard, at least until my Dramamine tolerance drops back down to a healthy nil.

By the way, is it still all right to use the term "wino" to describe one of those alcoholic bums on the street? Or has that too fallen under the sword of those euphemism-touting politicos of this do-nothing generation of American academics? I think "wino" is a perfectly acceptable term. Is it mean? Absolutely. Is it meaner than gently calling the people "unemployed urban campers with alcohol abuse issues"? I don't think so; most winos probably wouldn't even understand that name, because they're too fucking drunk. Maybe my moral compass isn't as fine as your average specimen of the New England intelligentsia, but then again I break that mold in a lot of ways, most notably in that I don't like modern art and never jerk off to The New Yorker.

While I'm still free associating, I'd like to add that I'm really don't have anything against The New Yorker. I mean, sure, it's smug, pretentious, opaque to the point of being outright vapid, and home to short stories so bad they make me lose hope in the future of American literature--if not literacy itself--but I'm still deeply grateful that it's still around. Just imagine what those editors would be doing otherwise. Can you say 'most obnoxious winos ever'?

Now let me tell you a little story which is actually true:

A few weeks ago I was riding the T from Boston to Cambridge with two of my Harvard buddies. The cart was crowded and we were standing up. Across the isle from us was sitting a dirty, hairy man who was clearly drunk. This was about 8:30 on a Friday night. I saw him tap a well-dressed man on the shoulder and ask if he would spare some change. The man told him he couldn't, and after harassing him for a minute longer, the dirty man eventually gave up and looked down at the ground. Then I saw him reach into his pocket and pull out a wad of cash. He rifled through the bills, counting them, and from the corner of my eye I could see that he had at least twenty bucks. I tapped my friends' shoulders and gestured to the man. After a moment he put the cash away and looked again at the ground.

Then this fellow decided to ask us if we could spare any change.

"What do you need change for, man?" I said. "You've got more money that I do."
"What are you talking about?" he said.
"I just saw you holding a huge wad of cash."
"No you didn't."
"Yeah," I say, "You're probably right." And I proceeded to ignore him. But one of my friends, who is, incidentally, from Alaska, pressed on:
"Why should we give you money, anyway, if you're just going to use it to get booze?"
"Hey, you don't know that," said the man.
"Well are you?" asked my friend.
"Yeah, well, maybe I am, but so what?"
"You don't need that. You clearly don't need booze. Why should I give you money for booze?"
The guy was quiet for a minute, as if he couldn't process the question. And it turned out, he couldn't, because he responded like this:
"So what, are you some rich punk ass kid? Is that it?"
"No," said my friend, "You've got more money that I do."
"What the fuck do you know? You're just a punk ass kid. You just got everything given to you."
"No I haven't."
"Oh yeah?"
"I'm proud of what I've accomplished."
"So your mommy and daddy gave you all the money you need? Yeah? I bet if you asked them for a hundred dollars they'd just give it to you."
"Yeah, that's right," my friend finally resigned. "I'm just a rich punk ass kid."
"Punk ass kid," said the guy.

Then he went silent again and looked at the floor. A few people on the train were staring at us and the rest were trying to stare at anything else. Right before our stop came the man pulled out his wad of cash and counted it again.

The doors opened and we quickly got off and climbed up into Harvard Square. Before going back to our dorm my friend went to a liquor store and bought us some vodka. It cost eighteen dollars and eighty-nine cents.

The Sentence that Kills Children

I do not consider myself to be a good writer. I do not even consider myself to be a decent writer. In fact, whenever I publish or hand in any written work I do so with an almost crippling sense of shame at how hopelessly inadequate my command of my native language remains despite eighteen years of total immersion in it. I do, however, have some grasp of what distinguishes utterly terrible writing from the inoffensively mediocre. Being that I can't write my way out of a subordinate clause without a nauseating degree of self-referential irony, I tend to hold back my nitpicks or outright condemnations of another's sub-substandard writing. Sometimes, though, there comes before my eyes such a travesty, such a shameful bastardization of all that marks English as a language worthy of human utterance, that I can not abide its existence. I'd compare it to being a bystander during the Holocaust, but that would be outrageous. I guess it's more like standing passive and inert while a child drowns in front of you. That's not so bad, right? I'm thinking the Jews wouldn't object to that level of insensitivity. Am I good? Judges? I'm getting the green light from Mordecai, my Hebrew-speaking roommate who is also the mounted head of a ram from Guatemala. Funny story about that, actually. Try getting that through customs. Ah, shit, this always happens. Where the hell was I? Jews? I need a drink.

Right. Ahem. Sorry about that. I was talking about writing.

So here is an excerpt from an article being used as an example of a good "conversational essay," in a freshman writing course at Columbia University. As you read this, try not to think of a child drowning. Try not to imagine her cherubic face sinking beneath the algae-encrusted surface of a stagnant pond as her arms slow their desperate thrashing and her bright blue eyes dilate in fear as she catches her last glimpse of this fleeting life, absolutely and permanently alone. Don't think about that at all.

"With its bright colors, rays of sun showering upon faces of influential leaders of different races, and inspiring slogans coined to stir the public to bridge the gap between races and socioeconomic divisions, a mural in the Soundview neighborhood of' the South Bronx on 174th St. entitled 'We Are Here to Awaken from the Illusions of Our Separateness" (Figs. 1-4) exemplifies a trend to create captivating and educational murals throughout New York City that deal with major socioeconomic and racial issues."

The horror. The...horror...

I'd like to point out up front that this is actually the first sentence of the essay. I'd also like to take a moment to ask the reader to consider whether or not he would ever willingly continue reading an essay that began like this, and if so, I'd like to humbly request that he shoot himself in the face.

I think I've thinned the herd enough. So let's begin.

First, take a moment to try to appreciate just how friggin' long this sentence is. Count the words. Go ahead. I dare you. No, but seriously, don't. It will hurt you. It's 80 words long.

Eighty words. Let's try to put that in perspective.

• The Lord's Prayer is 70 words long.
• Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?") is 114 words.
• The Gettysburg Address is 271 words.
• The Declaration of Independence is 1322 words.

The following passage, the entirety of Chapter III from Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time, is 75 words.

"We were in a garden at Mons. Young Buckley came in with his patrol from across the river. The first German I saw climbed up over the garden wall. We waited till he got one leg over and then potted him. He had so much equipment on and looked awfully surprised and fell down into the garden. Then three more came over further down the wall. We shot them. They all came just like that."

Before you object and say that using Hemingway as a comparison is unfair because the cornerstones of his style were short sentences and omission, among other things, take a minute to A.) suck my dick, and B.) kill yourself. Then read this following opening sentence from a little known work by Thomas "Two-Dolla-Billz" Jefferson:

"When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."

How long is this sentence, written in the 18th century era of diction so baroque it would have compelled Hemingway to punch a Spanish child in the face? Seventy-one words. Seventy-one words were all it took for Our Founding Fathers to state their thesis that America ought to be a country. But this other bitch can't even squirt out a point about some corny, inconsequential mural without weaving a 80-word brainfuck so serpentine it would make Milton ejaculate with envy. And yes, Milton could do that, because he was blind.

So allow me to break down this mammoth motherfucker into more manageable morsels. This sentence has:

• Two uses of the word "races," less than 15 words apart.
• Another use of the word "racial."
  
• Two uses of the word "socioeconomic."
• Two present active participles.
  
• Two perfect passive participles.
• Five uses of the word "of."
• Five uses of the word "the."
• One totally unnecessary and ill-placed address.
  
• One main singular subject, "a mural," 35 words deep in the sentence.
  
• One main verb, "exemplifies."
  
• No strong verbs.
  
• Nothing good at all.

A social studies teacher would call this sentence a "thesis," but only, I hope, through a clenched jaw and with tears of agony welling up in her eyes. An English teacher would call this sentence many things, most of them profane, but among them, "top-heavy."

What's a top-heavy sentence? It's a bland, fairly simple sentence that a lazy and/or foolish writer has decided to obscure by piling an unreasonable amount of adverbial phrases and other modifiers in front of it. Imagine a scrawny guy with knobby knees and a small penis who wears a mohawk to distract people from his shortcomings. Now turn him into a sentence. He's top-heavy, and he also, strangely enough, resembles a drowning child.

There are a few reasons someone might want to make a top-heavy sentence. None of them could possibly apply to thesis-writing. And besides, no amateur writer does this deliberately. They do it because they don't know shit.

Now let's really dig into these stupid literary mohawks.

"With its bright colors..."

So what the hell do bright colors have to do with anything? Let's put it somewhere else and see how it reads: "A mural with its bright colors exemplifies a trend to create captivating and educational murals..." Bright colors are arguably captivating, but is this person really using bright colors as evidence for a key point of her thesis? You know--since normally murals use dreary colors, so nobody will look at them. How astute of her to point out the bright colors. She's a sublime aesthete. A goddamn idiot-savant. Gag me.

"...rays of sun showering upon faces of influential leaders of different races..."

Isn't that pretty. I love rays of sun. I love them almost as much as rays of sunlight, which is a cliche which actually makes some sort of sense. And I love them almost as much as I love boring theses that try to wax poetic to cover up their complete irrelevance. I also love the use of "showering" to describe light, since we all know light falls just like rain and isn't a trite way to describe "rays of sun" at all. Though, the second half of the sentence is what really bothers me. Her use of influential is totally unnecessary. What leader isn't influential? She could have cut this sentence down to a trim 79 words, just like that. Worst of all, the ambiguity of "of" leaves the reader wondering if she means the leaders come from different racial backgrounds, or whether different races have their own leaders--like the King of the Blacks, or Emperor Whitey, or something. Nice attention to detail, Ms. Bright Colors.

"...and inspiring slogans coined to stir the public to bridge the gap between races and socioeconomic divisions..."

This one came as a relief. After slogging through those last two bewildering items on this list, I was appreciative that the writer thought to remind me that "inspiring" things are meant to "stir" people. I thought it had something to do with food or something, because I don't know much about them wordstuffs without her done telling me synonyms straightaway. It was also sweet of her to include that passive participle without any agent. Honestly, I don't really want to know who "coined" these slogans. I expect it's totally irrelevant. And I certainly know precisely what she means by the "gap between races." And the idea of "gaps between...divisions" just plain tickles me. I imagine it resembles the space between her ears.

I might be more willing to excuse this writer's offenses if I suspected she never read anything good. I mean, then, who could blame her for writing crap? If the extent of her literary experience was R.L. Stine and Barbara Kingsolver, then I'd understand and just shrug her off as a amiably goofy rookie. Unfortunately, I can't believe this. I can tell she's actually had some instruction in the art of essay writing, as well as at least an introduction to the quarks of rhetoric. How do I know this?

ASCENDING TRICOLON.

Ascending Tricolon is one of the most common rhetorical devices, and perhaps the easiest to use effectively. It really does the work for you. All you need to do is have a list of three things, hence the "tri-colon," and as you list them, make them either longer, more complicated, or more important in some way. Ascending tricolon mimics the structure of a good five-paragraph essay, in which the three-paragraph body begins with the weakest argument and builds to the strongest. Lots of people use this tool without even knowing what it's called, or maybe realizing they're doing it, in conversation as well as writing. It's a fairly commonsense way to phrase a list, and it generally works well in jokes. Paradoxically, the best way to tell that someone is conscious that they're doing it is if it's really, really poorly done. If it is clearly forced or just reeks of pretension. For instance, when someone really only has two things to list, but makes up a third to fill it out. This happens all the time in Time Magazine. It has also clearly happened in this train-wreck of a sentence we have in question. I mean, really: bright colors? Jesus H. Christ.

This girl has a level of education and rhetorical comprehension necessary to use ascending tricolon, but all the common sense of a squirrel trying to cross the street. She steps into this sentence, then freezes and thinks about the meaning of acorns or some shit, and apparently gets squished by a metaphorical bus, since it strikes her as a good idea to put in the address of the mural for no friggin' reason at all. I figure her brain was liquefied in the middle of writing this rubbish and all the information she actually had inside it just spilled out onto the page. Her ascending tricolon builds into a perfect anticlimax, almost twenty-five words of apposition, which is the syntactical equivalent of a sinkhole filled with the rotting corpses of unicorns.

Forget Hemingway punching this bitch in the face. We're talking a Cicero beatdown right here.

And then we finally get to the predicate, and she basically spits in our face. What she actually says, once you strip away all the fat, is "...a mural...exemplifies a trend to create...murals." You're kidding. That's what you're telling us? That's what took you EIGHTY WORDS? A mural is evidence of murals? I. HATE. YOU.


I can't go on any further. Eli, I'm tagging you in.

---------------
Well Tim, you pretty much covered all bases there. But let me stress again the needless repetition in this catastrophe of a sentence. We are told early on that the mural has "inspiring slogans coined to stir the public to bridge the gap between races and socioeconomic divisions". Awesome, now we know what the mural is all about. Yet, apparently the horrendous phrasing is not enough for the statement to stick in our minds. The author must again tell us at the end of the sentence that the mural "exemplifies a trend to create captivating and educational murals throughout New York City that deal with major socioeconomic and racial issues."

You're kidding. You're kidding! We already know the fucking mural is in New York. You even told us the address. We already know the whole crap about racial and socioeconomic issues, you told us about 50 words earlier. We even already know the mural is educational. What the FUCK did you tell us in those last 21 words? That it's a trend? Well I've got news for you, bud: By this point in time, I could care less if these murals were a fucking revolution. If you can't express your thoughts any better, they're not worth hearing.

In closing, I'd like to touch back on something Tim mentioned earlier. The only way to learn to write well is to read. Now, whether or not most college students read is a topic for another debate. However, by this point in the semester every Columbia student has read Homer's Iliad, Homer's Odyssey The Homeric Hymns and Herodotus' Histories. These books are the foundation of all literature. They may not be the best examples of how to write for the modern author, but if you are unable to take any sense of written language from them then there is no hope for your academic career. Please, do us all a favor and never write again.