clever, but not readable, extensible or maintainable

good one

This is cool, but it's not easy to read. Code should be as simple and easy for readability and maintainability.

true this is a good case of bad pratices the code should be/try to be easy to read to any person new to the code

Great!

Difficult to read

But, without return neither? This takes as argument(s) the variable itself and returns it all in one?

Why would that be necessary? Task states, that you're given words and you don't need to sanitize them. There are 100+ more unnecessary things he could do, what's the point of mentioning them?

Mine is similar :)

You can also include .strip() to remove any leading, and trailing whitespaces.

wow this took me a while to understand what it was doing

Гениально