I know you can just go to google and enter "bad writing contest" (which I just did), but this 1994 first place winner is really worth a look: ---------------- First prize goes to David Spurrett of the University of Natal in South Africa. He found this marvelous sentence-yes, it's but one sentence-in Roy Bhaskar's Plato etc: The Problems of Philosophy and Their Resolution (Verso, 1994):

"Indeed dialectical critical realism may be seen under the aspect of Foucauldian strategic reversal-of the unholy trinity of Parmenidean/Platonic/Aristotelean provenance; of the Cartesian-Lockean-Humean-Kantian paradigm, of foundationalisms (in practice, fideistic foundationalisms) and irrationalisms (in practice, capricious exercises of the will-to-power or some other ideologically and/or psycho-somatically buried source) new and old alike; of the primordial failing of western philosophy, ontological monovalence, and its close ally, the epistemic fallacy with its ontic dual; of the analytic problematic laid down by Plato, which Hegel served only to replicate in his actualist monovalent analytic reinstatement in transfigurative reconciling dialectical connection, while in his hubristic claims for absolute idealism he inaugurated the Comtean, Kierkegaardian and Nietzschean eclipses of reason, replicating the fundaments of positivism through its transmutation route to the superidealism of a Baudrillard."

It's a splendid bit of prose and I'm certain many of us will now attempt to read it aloud without taking a breath. The jacket blurb, incidentally, informs us that this is the author's "most accessible book to date." ---------------------