No
Joke
Students make
mistakes. (And so do teachers.) Hundreds of collections of howlers
produced by students must have been published world-wide.
Indeed such
a collection can make funny reading. as this excerpt proves:
The inhabitants
of ancient Egypt were called mummies. They lived in the Sarah
Dessert and traveled by Camelot. The climate of the Sarah is
such that the inhabitants have to live elsewhere, so areas of
the dessert are cultivated by irritation. The Egyptians built
the Pyramids in the shape of a huge triangular cube. The Pyramids
are a range of mountains between France and Spain.
Students are
often loath to proofread their own texts carefully. This exercise
makes finding mistakes a joyful activity.
It can be used in various ways:
1) Students discuss the passage in groups and
make any necessary corrections to turn it into a meaningful text.
2) Students try to translate the text as it is.
This may go against the students' grain but it teaches them to
focus very carefully on each word especially when they are told
beforehand how many mistakes there are.
3) An even
crazier way of using such a text would be to let students turn
it into a PowerPoint presentation full of visuals that emphasize
the errors.