Enact the bad thing — don't describe it

Showing beats telling even for negative examples. The move, stolen from George Saunders in a workshop discussion of his essay "The Braindead Megaphone," is to enact the thing you're mocking instead of labelling it. As a writer in our community, Sairam, put it:

Nobody writes a fake piece of slop and lets it embarrass itself on the page… Don't describe the bad thing. Write it — but keep it short, or you turn into the thing you're making fun of.

Sairam · Workshop discussion · June 2026

Show, even the negative

Saunders never writes the sentence "mass media lowers our collective intelligence." Instead he stages a party and drops into it a man with a megaphone who narrates the proceedings in a loud, banal voice. Because everyone can hear only him, he — in the phrase our discussion kept quoting — "puts an intelligence ceiling on the party": the guests' own conversations sink to the level of whatever the megaphone is braying. You watch the dumbing-down happen instead of being told about it, and the metaphor for cable news writes itself.

Daniel Kolitz does the same in his essay "The Goon Squad." He never asserts that the men in these chronic-masturbation Discord servers are lonely; he reports the scene deadpan. A self-appointed "wristband guy" frets over the participants' welfare — you can't go that long; are you staying hydrated? — and a twenty-three-year-old Egyptian who calls himself Fuji turns up in a "wank-battling server." The earnest, bureaucratic concern is funny, and under the comedy the ache for community shows through without a sentence of thesis.

The dose

Perform the bad thing in miniature, clearly framed as a specimen, then get out. Saunders's own readers caught the risk: one writer in our discussion noted that his megaphone essay is itself a little loud, "the dog crap in a bowl, the jokes that grab me before I thought anything through." Hold the parody past its point and you become the thing you are mocking.

A short, framed specimen indicts bad writing better than a paragraph about it.

Try it

1. When criticizing a register — hype, jargon, slop — write a brief, framed sample of it rather than describing it.
2. Keep it to a sentence or two, and signal it's a specimen so the reader is in on the joke.
3. Let an observed detail carry the judgment: like Kolitz's hydration-conscious gooner, a single specific can indict more than any adjective.
4. This is the sharp edge of pointing a camera at it: show the fault working.

Drawn from

• George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone (2007) — the title essay enacts the media voice it indicts. Amazon →