Work on your style

One of the pieces of work I marked today included a frankly rubbish simile. It was as rubbish as some rubbish. It was like a dustbin...you get the idea. I won't mention it here just in case it comes back to me but it did remind me that I had a worksheet on similes where students had to change the crap ones to something more creative. it was always one of the things they found toughest. I got them originally from one of those joke e mails but truly believe they were weaned from students' essays somewhere or other. Here they are anyway:

· He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a man who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.
· She caught your eye like one of those pointy hook latches that used to dangle from shed doors and would fly up whenever you banged the door open again.
· The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.
· McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a plastic Bag filled with vegetable soup.
· Her hair glistened in the rain like nose hair after a sneeze.
· Her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the centre.
· Bob was as perplexed as a hacker who means to access T:flw.quid55328.com\aaakk/ch@ung but gets T:\flw.quidaaakk/ch@ung by mistake
· Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever. (this looks made up mind you)
· He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree.
· The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.
· Her date was pleasant enough, but she knew that if her life was a movie this bloke would be buried in the credits as something like "Second Tall Man."
· The politician was gone but unnoticed, like the full stop after the Dr. on a Dr Pepper can. .
· John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
· The thunder was ominous-sounding, much like the sound of a thin sheet of metal being shaken backstage during the storm scene in a play.
· His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without a Bounce sheet