Friday, September 18, 2009

Not my favourite author

I've read Angels And Demons and The Da Vinci Code, and while I liked the basic plot, I never thought they were particularly well-written books. It's good to see someone shares my dislike of Brown's writing style:
Dan Brown's 20 worst sentences
Some of them are amusingly bad. I'd like to add to number 6's reason for being inept; How does studying the migration patterns of manta rays help with entanglement physics?

3 comments:

nathaniel said...

That article is a bit disappointing actually; it focuses too much on nit-picking detail - who cares if he writes both "echo" and "reverberant" in the same clause?? - the articles by Geoff Pullum were far more devestating, and more amusing too. Unfortunately, and typically, the Telegraph article doesn't link to them even though they were published on the net. I really wish online journals would work out how to embed links... anyway, here's the good stuff:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001628.html

http://158.130.17.5/~myl/languagelog/archives/000844.html

Sean said...

The two you linked to in your comment are much better, though neither of them points out that Brown doesn't seem to know the difference between biology and physics.

nathaniel said...

More entertaining Dan Brown bashing here:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1758