bore me to tears

What fun!  Have you heard about The Contest? 

Uh, no, not that Contest.

I’m talking about the Do you think you can write like Sarah Palin? contest.   Word on the street is that Sarah’s new book, Going Rogue, is quite a read.  Sarah has a style, apparently, and Slate challenged their readers:

Do you think you can write like Sarah Palin? If so, we want to hear from you. The goal is to write a sentence that could be mistaken for one from her book. Keep it to a single sentence of fewer than 150 words.

…

These sentences have the markings of what might be called the high Palin style (her writing, as opposed to her speeches): multiple references to local flora and fauna, heavy use of PSAT vocabulary, slightly defensive tone, difficult-to-parse meaning.

  
Sounds like fun, right?  If only I’d known about the contest before, not after, the fact, we could have sent champion wordsmith, JJ, over there to give it a go. 

Here’s the 1st Place entry:

One night after a long day of campaigning, when the haters had made my spirits reach a nadir, I looked into Todd’s eyes, which were as blue as the stripes on Old Glory, and too representing truth and loyalty, and he looked back at me with a twinkle of determination which I hadn’t seen since I told him my goal of having another baby in my fifties and naming it Tron, then did I know for sure that I could carry on, like he, and we, have done together all of these years on this long, Iron Dog race of a marriage that is at once grueling and celestial, onerous and majestic.

—Ann Sensenbrenner

For the top twelve, click here.

Bonus fun:  The single worst sentence from Going Rogue, according to Slate’s index?

As the soles of my shoes hit the soft ground, I pushed past the tall cottonwood trees in a euphoric cadence, and meandered through willow branches that the moose munched on. (p.102)

Hmm.  I wonder what that’d look like photoshopped…