Re: Examples of bad manual texts

[John Kohl <sasjqk -at- UNX -dot- SAS -dot- COM>]

In article <199703131124 -dot- MAA29384 -at- pip -dot- dknet -dot- dk>, "Peter Ring, PRC"
<prc -at- PIP -dot- DKNET -dot- DK> writes:
|> Colleagues,
|>
|> for my training activities I need some examples of bad English or
|> Danish manual texts. The text samples are to be used by my students
|> for rewriting into proper texts which are easy to read.
|>

Well, here's something that MIGHT be useful to you but which is
CERTAINLY good for a laugh:

   I came across the following discussion in comp.ai.nat-lang.  It
reminded me of the kinds of questions one of my professors used to ask
in his Rhetoric course exams.  But then I thought, "hey, with a little
modification, I could turn this into something resembling a dissertation
defense instead.  The Subject Heading was "Time Clouds in Natural
Language Understanding." I added some transitions and converted the
discussion into a dialogue, but I swear, the rest of the text was
excerpted virtually "as is" from a single post to the newsgroup!

John Kohl

------------------------------------------------------------------------


Candidate:
   Each verb stored episodically in your auditory memory channel has
   associative-tag links to a mini-grid of conceptual neurons joined
   together as the brain-mind locus or seat of a particular concept.

Examiner:
   Yes, but won't spontaneous eutectic translocation of third
   order endemes potentiate global execration of context-boundaries
   and inferentially depopulate the associate "das-ein" polytope of
   any fully generalisable cortico-memic representation structure?

Candidate:
   Yes, but Earl B. Hunt (author of "Iskysstvenny Intellekt") raised
   this objection already in October of 1980.  He wagged his finger and
   said, "You're not going to get anywhere by drawing diagrams."

Examiner:
   Well, the Amiga public-domain AI program Mindrexx has demonstrated
   that there is a kind of temporal nebula or "time-cloud" enveloping
   the node of comprehension of a verb where its conceptual mini-grid is
   linked to other concepts of the syntactic assertion of a thought.

Candidate:
   Mayhap, but once you store and comprehend the sentence, "Bears eat
   honey," a node of the concept "eat" persists in your cortex and
   predisposes you however slightly to associate not only bears with
   eating, and honey with eating, but, when given any two of the three
   engrammed concepts, to summon up the third concept of the
   comprehended idea henceforth linking the trio of concepts into a unit
   of knowledge.

Examiner:
   Isn't this simply a trivial n-free tripartite parametrisation of the
   well-known ursan alimentaric apocryphon?

Candidate [cleverly noting that the last was a trick question!]:
   The ursan alimentaric apocryphon will not be available for
   inspection until cani arrabiadi ed inglesi [dogs, Arabs, and
   Englishmen???] go out in the mid-day sun.  I suggest that you refer
   to Gomibaka, Merdsac, Trasjkaan.  "Quasi-Local Migration of Alimentary :
   Semantons in an n-Free 'Kugel' Polytope", AINL/JSK Apr'89, 437-441.

[The candidate passes with flying colors!]

 TECHWR-L (Technical Communication) List Information: To send a message
to 2500+ readers, e-mail to TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU -dot-  Send commands
   to LISTSERV -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU (e.g. HELP or SIGNOFF TECHWR-L).
  Search the archives at http://www.documentation.com/  or search and
browse the archives at http://listserv.okstate.edu/archives/techwr-l.html