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When you can no longer rely on the press to write... |
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This Entry: Date: 2003-11-29 Time: 15:02 Comments: 0 Return To: Recent Entries | |||
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When you can no longer rely on the press to write…What is with the author of the Globe and Mail’s Toronto girl’s street smarts ended mayhem? (Sat. Nov 29)This article is badly written… plain and simple. First, the sentence structure is almost impossible to follow. Second, the article doesn’t know whether it wants to be a factual story about: (a) the details of a toronto homicide, (b) the girl who called police about the toronto homicide, (c) a retrospective about Charles Manson, (d) the provisions of the new youth criminal justice act, or (e) an opinion piece about the value of open trials. Let’s look at the writing first: It is the alleged plan to annihilate the boy’s whole family — supported by the fact that when his 41-year-old stepfather arrived at the house shortly after the boy had come from school, he was also assaulted, but with a baseball bat — and unspecified “cultish” aspects of the case that have evoked the helter-skelter reference.I’m trying to read the newspaper, not a Ph.D. thesis, which seems to be the style on offer here. That last sentence has 54 words, and it isn’t a good 54 word sentence, either! There are an average of 31.5 words per sentence in this piece. The following two sentences are almost incomprehensible. Did the writer really believe that we were going to be able to extract anything from these two sentences? 39 and 45 words long? The first is incredibly poorly punctuated to boot. Just 100 pounds and 4 feet 10 inches tall, he died of knife wounds to the throat, his airway and the arteries and veins of his neck slashed in the assault — what forensic experts sometimes label as classic “overkill”. Tellingly, he had only one so-called “defensive injury” to his hands — these are usually incurred when a victim is able to fight back — and was likely quickly overpowered by his attackers, just one of whom is over six feet tall and weighs about 200 pounds. With respect to the “organization” of the piece, I will give the writer the benefit of the doubt and believe they were confused about the purpose of the piece. Really, there is no excuse for the kind of disorganized writing on offer here. I became more and more incredulous the more I read through the piece, wondering what sharp turn was coming next. The Globe and Mail needs to invest more heavily in careful editing at all levels. Story editors need to be watching for stories that need to be broken up to improve their organization. Copy editors must not allow 53 word sentences to be published in the paper. There is no excuse for bad writing when it’s your job.
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