One of the students in my editing class last semester complained in their student evaluation of the course about the dullness of the copy they edited.* Apparently the texts were about matters of no particular interest, as well as being badly written.
The texts in my editing course are from newspapers, most of which I have collected over the years from the staff of The Baltimore Sun. If you are looking for specimens of low-grade prose, American newspapers are a rich lode.**
Yes, those texts are not interesting, unlikely to have been of particular interest even for the audience for whom they were originally written. Dull, deadly dull.
And this—I must double down on my explanations to the undergraduates who fall into my hands two weeks from tomorrow—is precisely what will prepare them for the working world of writing and editing. If they succeed in finding a place in that world, much that they work with will be of modest interest, if that.
If they go into business, law, or government, they will be writing and editing memorandums. If they go into scientific and technical publications, they will be compelled to give minute and precise attention to highly arcane texts. If they get into journalism, God help them, they will deal with copy like the specimens in my class.
I will have to reveal to them the brutal, fundamental truth of editing: Most of what you edit will be defective prose, and the most you will be able to accomplish is to leave it as merely mediocre.
Someday, maybe, they will thank me for having warned them.
*Did I not tell them, on the very first day, that the class would be "unrelievedly, appallingly dull"?
**The only lesson to be learned from editing well-written prose is to leave it alone.