How to Cook Tomatos with Eges

My respects to Richard Lerderer and his book Anguished English. In the beginning of the book, he has a chapter called “The World According to Student Bloopers.” It gives some interesting and previously unknown historical insights such as “Joan of Arc was burned into a steak” and “Queen Elizabeth exposed herself before her troops and then her navy went out and defeated the Spanish armadillo.”

Today I found a chance to compile something similar. I’m working as an English teacher in China at the moment, and we just finished one term. I was assigned to teach a writing course, and so one of the topics we covered was how to describe a process or give instructions. There were a lot of things to keep in mind for developing a paragraph by process, such as verb tenses, second person address, transitions, etc, so I decided to get the students to revisit this type of paragraph on the final exam.

The question asked students to teach the reader how to cook their favourite food. In China, a popular dish that is easy to make is stir-fried tomatos and eggs, so at least half of my students wrote about how to make this. Despite their homework being pretty well-written most of the time, the writing on the exam was atrocious for some reason. Like Lerderer with History, below is a recipe of the compiled mistakes I found in my students’ exams about making tomatoes with eggs:

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You need to prepare some material like two eges and two tomatos and oil. If you like tomatos you can add more.

First, you should put the tomatos into a water-pool and clearn them carefully. You should clearn them by change water three times. When you can make sure about the tomatos are clearn enough and put them on a table.

Second, you need to spoil the edges. This is how. Brake the two eges into a bow, a big one, by knocking their middle. And mix them with chopsticks until they are disturbed. If you like, add a suitable amount of soul, and if you like saccharine then add some sugar. Then you can fire a fire under a pen or some other cooking machine and pour some oil. You should let the pen hung on the fire for a few second until the oil is boiling, then fry the eges until they are yellow.

Third, you should cook the tomatos by cutting them into picie. The fourth step may be the most important one. Put them into a pen and hit them with fire until they are juicy, then make the eges together in the pen. Wait until you can smell something special, it means they are born and can be easted. Don’t forget to turn off the machine. If you like you can fry it with rice, but make sure to take the rice apart with a large spoop before you add rice otherwise it can’t be cooked.

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The huge emphasis on cleaning tomatoes isn’t the student trying to add supercilious details. In China, you really do need to wash tomatoes three times. I still don’t understand why so many students wrote “fry the eggs until they are yellow.” Aren’t eggs yellow before you fry them too? am I missing something?

“Soul” is supposed to be “salt.” There was another one who spelled it like “sault.” “Saccharine” probably came from me teaching them that they should try to be formal.

The word “pen” is supposed to be “pan,” obviously. Another interesting alternative spelling for “pot” was “pet.” It’s a pity that the student wasn’t writing about hotdogs.

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