>"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents

>>8382861
I don't think it is dreadful, but the addition of (for it is in London that our scene lies) makes it sound comical. It reads as if the narrator forgot to mention that detail earlier and it breaks the rythmn of the sentence.

I would split the sentence in two, ending the first at up the streets. The next would read: 'The wind rattled along the housetops and fiercly agitated the scanty flames of those lamps which struggled against the darkness.'

The third sentence would be the better place to introduce the scene. We have a brodding description which is then followed by a confirmation.

>>8382898
Actually: 'The wind rattled along the housetops, fiercly agitating those lamps struggling against the darkness.' Sounds better.

>>8382912
>those lamps
why

Not a native speaker so never was exposed to that as quintessential bad example.
To me it's bad because:
- "dark and stormy night" immediately sounds like an ambience cliché
- the cut to "except at occasional intervals" is very inelegant and shifts the focus of the sentence further into a detail we would have assumed to have only been penned to set the scene and frankly don't give this much of a shit about, nor were expected to be asked to coming from that beginning,
- the aside "for it is in London" is another layer intruding YET AGAIN into the sentence, and what's worse, with what follows, interrupting it while the grammatical subject (the rain or the wind, we can't say yet) is still hanging; it also wants to paint a wider characteristic of the setting than what the description is currently concerned with, feels like it should have come before or after
- more stuff we don't care about coming afterwards

but it's not offensively bad.

>>8382921
expect by reading this thread you've already been exposed and are biased

>>8382861
didn't even know what a pleonasm was desu, thanks

i know this intro has reached meme status (imo undeservedly) but it is definitely pretty boring as scene setting goes. all the stuff you quoted that starts with "it was" features something unusual or an assertion

lamp flames struggling against the darkness is also cliched but it doesnt really matter that much

in conclusion unfairly maligned but its dull

Literally the only thing bad is the aside, which makes it sound like it's parodying a Shakespearean play.

>>8382924
obviously. Was replying to OP's "if you weren't taught in school"

>>8382919
You're right: 'fiercly agitating the lamps that struggled against the darkness' is much less clunky.

>>8382933
Too late, his mind is already contaminated and his opinion as an outsider is now worthless

>>8382919
"those lamps that..." would imply the existence of other lamps having already succumbed or never having been set to put up a fight

>>8382944
Interdasting.

>>8382861

There is nothing wrong with this beautiful writing.

Someone do that miligram experiment where you have graduate students explain why the line is good, and then ask undergrads to do the same thing.

>>8382861
The only problem is the aside (for it is in London...) which despite the "for it is" is not connected to the sentence it's in and contains first person in a paragraph which seems to be in third person, taking the reader out of the story in a way that children's books usually do

Other than that, this opening is from a celebrated book (or story? I can't remember). The stormy night part is a cliche because this story was popular, not because it was bad

>>8383944
>he stormy night part is a cliche because this story was popular
I somehow doubt that a single English-language story is at the root of "a stormy night" being a cliche

>>8382861
>cites two newspaper hacks and a spinster hack as support
are you trying to prove it's a bad example by pointing out other hacks got published?

>>8382861
Because it's a complete cliche. You read it and sure you immediate get the visual imagery in your head. No matter the person we've all experienced dark and stormy nights so we can immediately visualized the idea. But it doesn't register. It's static. White noise.

Try to recall the last cliche movie you watched. The plot was cliche, the dialogue was predictable, and the actors were mediocre. Did any of the movie really register? Sure, you can recall it because cliches stick in your head, it's why they're cliches to begin with. But did you actually watch the movie the way you watch your favorite, or some epic drama like Citizen Kane? No. It was static. It numbed you for the runtime.

This line does the same. It doesn't engage you at all. It just lies in your brain, uselessly, like a pop song that'll be dead and gone by next week.

>>8385886
> like a pop song that'll be dead and gone by next week.

Except this line is now immortal.

>>8382861
It's bad because it sounds like the author is speaking like a boring old man from the 7th century. I mean who says "for it is in London that our scene lies" in 2016!? He should have just said "It was a stormy night in London", I mean we get it, honestly there's no need to go and on about boring detail.

>>8382861
>It was a dark and stormy night
This in itself is not terrible since this sentence is the source of the cliché.
>(for it is in London that our scene lies)
This just sounds really stupid and out of place and completely breaks the rhythm of the sentence like another user said.
>rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
This part really contributes to the clunkiness of the sentence, especially the part about the lamps.

The sentence isn't bad because it uses clichés (since this is the source of the cliché you can't really accuse it of being cliched) but because it's so clunky. It's a poorly constructed sentence that falls apart after "streets" and before that it's just a very nondescript sentence that could fit into the works of many other Victorian writers.

>>8385895
Yeah and in the same way you can probably remember the lyrics to The Black Eyed Peas Imma Be

>>8382861
For one, it's overused, so if a modern work would start like that, it could only work as irony.

Other than that, it wastes tons of words and doesn't tell the reader anything beyond a weather report and location. I still don't know who I am dealing with nor why I should care about the situation.

>>8382861
There is nothing wrong with it other than
>(for it is in London that our scene lies)
and it's punctuated weirdly. Why is there a dash instead of a comma?

Do students learn that this is a bad line or something?

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>>8382861
>It was a dark and stormy night.
>dark night
>There are bright moonlit nights.

>>8385898
>7th century
>writing in vernacular

>>8382861
This is closer to the writing style in Moby Dick than any Melville fan is going to be comfortable admitting.
>>8388798
There are bright nights if you get north enough.

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>>8388812
The moon can give us little light,
But not enough to call it bright.
I think I'm doing the poem right,
Because of the unintended rhyme.

Sorry for my shitty poem, I am not a native English speaker.

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>dem lamps

>>8388812
I'm not a Melville fan and I not only strongly disagree but suspect that your perceptions are limited by the same sort of ignorance normally attributed to people who praise Wilde or Orwell as some of the best English language writers (I don't want to say it but you know what that means).

>>8382944
That's better, though

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This is a major fucking problem with many so called "readers": they have real difficulty substantiating what they consider to be good prose and bad prose.

The prevalence of this as an archetype of bad writing has nothing to do with the actual sentence itself (it's simply a mediocre opening line to a mediocre Victorian novel) and everything to do with its style going out of vogue at the turn of the century. Romantic prose is considered hopelessly excessive by assholes who've only read Hemingway and Carver and think they've uncovered some universal secret to crafting good prose (i.e muh iceberg, muh polysyndeton, wtf i hate semi-colons now etc.) In Paul Clifford, the novel this line opens, the protagonist is (quoting wikipedia) "a man who leads a dual life as both a criminal and an upscale gentleman"; hence the focus on contrasting images of lamplight and darkness.


Truly bad prose (of which you can find many examples; just look in critique threads) is thoughtless, careless and serves no purpose as a part of the larger whole of the work. This line is not particularly inspired, but it's functional and certainly far from the archtype of bad writing that it is often professed to be. I'd say its more or less on a level with "Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself" and the Orwell example posted by O.P.

One day we'll look back and mock some sparse and stripped back line from one of the "minimalist" writers I mentioned earlier, not because they're bad, but simply because their style will be out of vogue and because people still won't be able to assess prose for themselves.

>>8390313
desu some of the criticism in this thread hasn't been terrible.

>>8390376
Look, man. I ain't about to champion this as a great opening line. I just think the fact that it retains its reputation as the "worst"opening line is more significant of historical context than anything else.

Because it's a cliche.

>>8390806
>Look, man

>>8390994
you got a fucking problem with >Look, man mate?

>>8391001
This anon stands by his beliefs.

>>8382921
>- the cut to "except at occasional intervals" is very inelegant and shifts the focus of the sentence further into a detail we would have assumed to have only been penned to set the scene and frankly don't give this much of a shit about, nor were expected to be asked to coming from that beginning,
How would effective imagery or atmosphere be created without describing details ?

>>8388869
one night can be darker than another, so it makes perfect sense to qualify a night as being particularly dark. imagine going outside at night and finding it to be unusually dark. you could imagine saying "wow, it's dark tonight."
then imagine that another night you go outside with a friend when there's more moonlight. your friend says "it's pretty dark." you could imagine saying, "you think today is dark? you should have been here yesterday. THAT was a dark night."

>>8382861
Mostly because "It was a dark and stormy night" is a platitude, and was even then. OP's pic related, that's why it was parodied in the first place.