How to Razzle-Dazzle through English

[Parrhesia]

DISCLAIMER: Expect an actual story (the soon-to-be mentioned 'Haven') here, soon. So it actually fits in Written Works. Or something.

I realised yesterday that my creative response, an assignment handed out around four weeks ago, was due...well, today. This is what usually happens to my assignments, but following my simple system for Creative Responses, I was able to smooth out my time constraints and submit an assignment easily in time. And by reading through this latest entry in 'How to Bullshit through English', so can you!

RULE ONE

Try and be all mystical and shit. It makes you look really smart, as if you know what you're doing.

In my latest piece, Haven, which I shall put up here in a couple days to make a safe buffer so that I'm not accused of plagiarising from myself (which would, admittedly, be hilarious), there's a lot of bullshit about 'Migration' and how everything ties into 'Ambivalence towards technology', even though I wrote the damn thing in a good three hours.

RULE TWO

Always be really flowery, to pad out your wordcount as much as possible. A good old-fashioned Line Spacing 1.5 can never hurt here, either. And remember, a thousand words really means nine hundred and fifty.

Haven lasted a solid 1300 words, and nudged barely under the required 200 words of Rationale, but as it was a hard copy, who's going to check? It would honestly have been a better piece of writing at a thousand, maybe nine hundred words (fuck the Rationale), but quality isn't important.

RULE THREE

When it comes to sympathy, nothing beats mutilated children. Particularly if you can claim it links into your own feelings about the piece.

In Haven, one character is born blind and another has her tongue ripped out at fourteen.

RULE FOUR

With regards to characters, just reuse familiar archetypes that the teacher you're attempting to pander to hasn't encountered yet.

In Haven, the two main characters were just reused names of mine. Esther, as always, was the dynamic chick who fought things, and Diandra, as always, had...horrible things happen to her.

RULE FIVE

One of the most vital steps, try to do just one thing that no other motherfucker could possibly have thought of, and then claim that everything revolves around it. It doesn't have to actually add to the narrative, you just have to pretend it does. After all, what's the rationale for?

Haven had one line of dialogue. It was a pretty important line, at that. This was made easier by the mute protagonist (see Rule Three example).

THE GOLDEN RULE

Finally, the most important step of all; pretend that EVERYTHING means something. If Biff the Carpenter has a crooked nose, it represents the failed Malaysia deal and how it affects our reputation as a country. If Darren dies because someone threw a boot at his head, it represents Italian dominance over the rest of Europe. If Marjorie orders a pie, it means that modern art is beginning to fail.

Haven is...rife with this. Seriously, the rationale contains the sentence 'Rebirth was my primary method of drawing these themes across, using the personal journey of the character Esther to signify the death of the old order in favour of a new way of life', and not even I know what that means. But most importantly, it was thirty words in which I managed to say absolutely nothing.

Coming up soon; Essays!

Edited September 2, 2011 by Furekitty

[Naglfar]

Alternate title: how to write fiction like an Australian

[XiSrOn]

If this was on facebook, I would like it.

But since it isn't I don't like it at all.

[Inactive Account]

If it hadn't been two years already, I would feel compelled to write one of these about how to write essays for AP English. They operate on similar principles of bullshit.