Humorous Errors on Student Essays

Some students have a way of writing things in a slightly different manner than intended, as demonstrated in the following excerpts from tests and essays of eight graders through college, complied by Richard Lederer, a teacher in St Paul.

• The Greeks were a highly sculptured people, and without them we wouldn’t have history. The Greeks also had myths. A myth is a female moth.

• The Magna Carta provided that no man should be hanged twice for the same offense.

• The Bible is full of interesting caricatures. In the first book of the Bible, Guinessis, Adam and Eve were created by an apple tree. One of their children, Cain, asked, “Am I my brother’s son?”

• Ancient Egypt was inhabited by mummies and they all wrote in hydraulics. They lived in the Sarah Dessert. The climate of the Sarah is such that the inhabitants have to live elsewhere.

• Moses led the Hebrew slaves to the Red Sea, where they made unleavened bread, which is bread made without ingredients. Moses went up on Mount Cyanide to get the Ten Commandments. He died before he ever reached Canada.

• Solomon had three hundred wives and seven hundred porcupines.

• Homer was not written by Homer but by another man of that name.

• In the Olympic games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled biscuits, and threw the java.

• It was an age of great inventions and discoveries. Gutenberg invented removable type and the Bible. Another important invention was the circulation of blood.

• Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100-foot clipper.

• The greatest writer of the Renaissance was William Shakespeare. He was born in the year 1564, supposedly on his birthday.

• Queen Victoria was the longest queen. She sat on a thorn for 63 years. Her death was the final event that ended her reign.

• The winter of 1620 was a hard one for the Pilgrims. Many died and many babies were born. Captain John Smith was responsible for all this.

• Thomas Jefferson, a Virgin, and Benjamin Franklin were two singers of the Declaration of Independence. Franklin discovered electricity by rubbing two cats together. Franklin died in 1790 and is still dead.

• Gravity was invented by Isaac Walton. It is chiefly noticeable when apples are falling off the trees.

• Johann Bach wrote a great many musical compositions and had a large number of children. In between he practiced on an old spinster which he kept in the attic. Bach died from 1750 to the present.

• Handel was a great composer. He was half German, half Italian and half English. He was very large.

• Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf. He was so deaf he wrote loud music. Beethoven expired in 1827 and later died for this.

• The nineteenth century was a time of many inventions. People stopped reproducing by hand and started reproducing by machine. The invention of the steamboat caused a network of rivers to spring up.

• William Tell shot an arrow through an apple while standing on his son’s head.

• The sun never sets on the British Empire because the British Empire is in the East and the sun sets in the West.

• Abraham Lincoln became America’s greatest Precedent. Lincoln’s mother died in infancy, and he was born in a log cabin that he built with his own hands.

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Quote for the Day – "Students achieving Oneness will move on to Twoness." Woody Allen

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Bret Burquest is the author of 12 books. He lives in the Ozark Mountains with a few dogs and is a former college instructor (among other things) who has long ago achieved oneness, but still working on twoness.

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