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October 07, 2003 - 8:18 a.m.

Found some examples of really bad writing via Jack Lynch's page... here's his take on mixed metaphors:

We were swamped with a shocking barrage of work, and the extra burden had a clear impact on our workflow.

Let's count the metaphors: we have images of a marsh (swamped),

electrocution or striking (shocking), a military assault (barrage),

weight (burden),

translucency (clear),

a physical impression (impact),

and a river (flow),

all in a mere twenty words. If you can summon up a coherent mental image including all these elements, your imagination's far superior to mine.

That was a made-up example; here's a real one, from The New York Times, 11 June 2001:

Over all, many experts conclude, advanced climate research in the United States is fragmented among an alphabet soup of agencies, strained by inadequate computing power and starved for the basic measurements of real-world conditions that are needed to improve simulations.

Let's see: research is fragmented among soup (among?); it is strained (you can strain soup, I suppose, but I'm unsure how to strain research); and it is starved � not enough soup, I suppose. Or maybe the soup has been strained too thoroughly, leaving people hungry. I dunno.

The moral of the story: pay attention to the literal meaning of figures of speech and your writing will come alive.

Don't, by the way, confuse mixed metaphors with mangled clich�s � though a mixed metaphor might result from a botched clich�, they're not the same thing. If there's no metaphor, there's no mixed metaphor.

 

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