Thursday, June 5, 2008

The Onion



My students turned me on to this website: The Onion. I remember being exposed to this because someone was trying to play a joke on me once. The Onion is a fake news site that pokes fun of situations, issues, anything going on. It's also a source where people might take it seriously. People will believe anything if it's published.

When I was student teaching, one teacher gave another teacher an article from the Onion about teaching, which was wild and outrageous. Of course, the teacher thought it was serious, so she hung it up on her door and talked about it with her students. Whoops. That site is totally fake and outrageous.

My students now showed me an article about a caterpillar that got loose and destroyed everything in its path. Read it here. When I was reading it, I couldn't help but notice how incredible the writing is. These writers are extremely talented. They know how to exaggerate, poke fun of, and mimick the news. This is creative writing at its best. It's almost a great idea at an assignment. They use such strong word choice to get across this outrageous feeling. You've got to read it to connect with it.

Check out some of these crazy titles, the most viewed articles:

Escaped Caterpillar On Rampage Through City
Barbie Suing Bratz
Restaurant Patrons Entranced By Sizzling Order Of Fajitas
Michigan, Florida Get Half Representation
Closing Of Homeless Shelter Leaves College-Application-Padding Students With Nowhere To Turn
Germans Making 'Green' Bombs

Check out the website here.



What do you think of The Onion? Good/bad articles?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I hear they won an award for some of their articles and one of the stipulations to the awards ceremony is your thank you speech has to be 5 words long.