Chocolate Cake for Dinner

This site used to rely on the chocolate cake metaphor to encourage my students to write "healthy" prose rather than half-baked, wordy or sub-standard prose. A young friend changed all that when she asked me why I wouldn't want my students to write tasteful, carefully-shaped, "chocolate-frosted" papers. I confess to preferring her version of my students' writing potential, focusing on the writing process as a careful application of aesthetic appreciation, good taste and talent, so I have abandoned the old approach of using chocolate cake as a cautionary metaphor, and simply retain the photograph as literal eye-candy.

Meanwhile, there are still rules I would have my students learn and follow, with or without the fancy chocolate connection.

"Good prose"-- good writing of any kind-- takes time and effort and a determination to create something to be proud of. Writers can take cheap, easy short-cuts and clog their readers' brains with fatty (or, as Richard Lanham calls it, "larded") language, or they can make the extra effort to create clear, well-written prose.  Most writers who take their craft seriously will choose the latter, refining the "recipe" for their creations until they have devised a lean, well-presented paper.