"I can now give you an exclusive preview of what you should be excising from your life if you want to be truly cutting-edge. According to WIRED, all these things will soon be history..." This came across Nettime a while ago, and I got a kick out of it. The list includes: voicemail, housework, chores, insomnia, fear of public singing, pirated software, burnt toast, and more.
The preview in question is the result of a quick search on the WIRED site after the writer found himself "getting annoyed all over again at the breathless prose they use in their articles."
In the composition biz, one of the things I think most teachers get annoyed at is the pervasiveness of this kind of phrase, whether it's "since the beginning of time/humanity/history," "children are our future," or the favorite of most local tv journalists, "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is." These kinds of lists, and the searches that produce them, may someday be one of the writing teacher's best friends. Imagine being able to show students that the phrase "a thing of the past" appears in 9277 books on Amazon.com (I checked) and/or in hundreds of student essays. Or that the search results for "if it sounds good to be true..." shows that the phrase appears predominantly in self-help books (it does). Just as our friend at test.org.uk has guaranteed I'll never use the phrase "a thing of the past" unselfconsciously again, databases may ultimately offer us concrete evidence to help students move beyond formulaic prose.
And by students, I mean all of us, myself included.
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