Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Week 9: Not-so-good stuff
Try to find a moment or a phrase or something that didn't work. I know this is quite subjective, but that just means you need to argue your point well. Being a good writer means knowing when something doesn't flow or fit with the rest of the piece. Good writing also comes from good editing. So, what piece would you edit out of this week's reading?
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"The call by some members of the black media for African Americans to support President Obama in racial solidarity is a terrible idea."
This was Kathleen Parker's opening line in her Oct. 18th piece. Going straight from the title of the article, "Obama’s African American supporters shouldn’t play the race card" to that first line made me feel as if Parker was dogmatically stating her opinion on the matter before even telling the reader what had been going on with Obama's black voters. It reminded me of a robotic essays I used to write in third grade. I think, as a journalist, Parker should have first informed the reader about the events that caused her to write the article, mixing in a little of her own commentary, and then ended with her opinion about it.
"Oh, wait: Lots of Americans don't want more immigrants." -Joel Achenbach
Achenbach uses a lot of humor and at times sarcasm in his writing. In other pieces, this style does not bother me very much but in this article, I did not think he used it in an effective way. The article is about "reinventing" towns that "need a jolt of life desperately" and this specific use of sarcasm seems more like a rude comment to those who don't necessarily support immigrants than a chance to bring humor or a casual tone to the article. I don't think he was trying to do this, but I do think that because he went a little overboard on the sarcasm that he distracts the reader from the main points of his article.
"Even the handsomest men do not have the same momentary effect on the world as a truly beautiful woman does"
PERSONALLY, I disagree with this statement of Jon Carrol's. I think men do have an equal monetary effect it is just that we cannot notice it while woman can. Throughout the rest of his article he explains this further but after finishing the article I still did not approve of this statement.
"The Series had characters and character.
And, relatively speaking, the Super Bowl of baseball drew green flies."
Wojciechowski usually incorporates clever language and comparisons into his articles that give them a very unique touch. He's clearly just trying to do the same here, but the result looks like some of my first drafts. Sometimes, clever writing is less effective than getting the idea across in a straightforward manner. Here, "characters and character" gets the point across, but at the expense of looking as professional as Woj usually is. Likewise, the "Super Bowl of baseball" is just gratuitous. It's not heinous, but "World Series" works as well if not better and doesn't force the reader to try to work out what the heck he's getting at.
"Congress is able to funnel vast sums of money to its favored funders through the tax code—without anyone realizing it. The simplest way to get the corruption out of Washington is to remove the prize that members of Congress give away: preferential tax treatment."
Zakaria used ten hyphens and colons in a span of less than 500 words. Although he often utilizes these pieces of punctuation very effectively to emphasize his points, after three or four it is just overkill. He would greatly benefit from reading his piece aloud so that he hears the choppy sentences clearly, such as the ones above. Zakaria should focus on varying his sentence structure in order to make his ideas stand out, not on simply putting them at the end of every sentence.
"He was wearing dark glasses and a fake glued-on beard." - Henry K. Lee
This statement somewhat fails because the fact that the robber wore a glued-on beard is the the title of the article, making the column somewhat redundant. Lee should have either found other pertinent information with which to identify the robber or just have not made an additional statement at all just to clarify, as I said, something the title of the article explicitly states.
"One volunteer’s statement, which the scientists include in their report, captures this dynamic in a telling and disturbing way: 'How could I squelch the urge to set my manager on fire,' the student asked, 'if I couldn’t set people on fire in video games?'"
- Wray Herbert
This article in general was poorly-written. It seemed that Herbert mainly referenced other scientists instead of coming up with his own conclusions. Although the topic of this article, video games as cathartic, was an interesting one, Herbert did not take full advantage of it in his writing. As a concluding statement, I do not think this particular sentence was effective. It seemed unrelated to what was mentioned in the article and too wedged in. I think this is Herbert's attempt to maintain the reader's attention, even when he knows he has clearly lost it.
In an article about the Occupy Wall Street protests that are being emulated around the world, Anne Applebaum writes about a similar protest in London. She details a method of projecting a speaker's message by having the crowd repeat it, and relates it to a scene the Monty Python movie "Life of Brian". She then adds:
"To my American ear, the resemblance is reinforced by the fact that the speakers are British and thus sound as if they belong in a Monty Python movie anyway."
In addition to being unnecessary,and maybe even a little bit offensive, this statement only serves to discredit her message.
"Daniel Kahneman spent part of his childhood in Nazi-occupied Paris...Kahneman doesn’t actually tell that childhood story in his forthcoming book."
David Brooks' opening anecdote about the life of Daniel Khaneman tries to introduce the reader to the author, but has absolutely nothing to do with the book Khaneman wrote. Brooks even says it himself, that he doesn't tell the story in his book about human behavior and instinct vs thought. This opening line does not connect to the rest of the article, and really alienates the reader when they get to the actual reason for writing the column, which was to advertise this new book. I can see that Brooks is trying to get the reader to care about Khaneman and his story, but to me it just doesn't work. Overall, it is a nice story, but the fact is that the opening three paragraphs just seem wasteful in a column that is supposed to be concise and specific.
“Ladies and gentlemen, today in this very space, a man will attempt to write sentences in the English language.”
This is the closing line to Jon Carroll’s article about Harry Houdini. The entire piece focused solely on the man and the mystery that was Houdini. So, when I came to this last line, I was pretty startled. I think Carroll was trying to be funny by comparing himself to a magician. The joke fell flat for me because of how unconnected it was to the rest of the piece. This was not an article about writing an article. A closing line should be a wrap-up. This line was just a fail of a witty, unrelated, side comment.
The question was regarding the asker's gay son:
"Getting back to the daughter business: You should also regard your son, at least through his adolescence, as more of a daughter to you than a son. We tend to be more protective of our daughters—our straight daughters—than we are of our sons." -Dan Savage
This is one of the few Savage quote blurbs that I haven't outright agreed with. I think my reason for that is the way in which Savage poses his suggestion, that this parent be more protective of her son, by looking through the lens of how parents treat children of different sexes. For me, Savage's approach here just didn't match up with the content: if a woman asks you whether or not she should let her gay son attend a school dance with his significantly older boyfriend, you should consider this situation as is, not imagine that your son is a girl. The principle just doesn't line up with the prescription.
"True, trying to win a national championship by beating Big Ten teams is like trying to get drunk drinking non-alcoholic beer, but what do you want them to do?"
Although I thoroughly enjoyed Rick Reilly's story this week, this line stood out to me negatively not just because I am a Big Ten fanatic, but also because it has been proven false. Since 2000 a Big Ten team (Ohio State) has gone to the BCS National Championship game three times, winning once. Reilly's statement is somewhat valid as it is difficult for a Big Ten team to make its case to be included in the championship game, but the simile is blown out of proportion. The rest of the article utilizes similes to prove Reilly's points, but this particular one retracts from it.
"Let’s hope these entertainers steer clear of Zuccotti Park, but you never know."
I think this line is rather superfluous mainly because Bruni does a fine job getting his point of view across throughout the article. This is a conclusive line that is unnecessary and in tone doesn't match the rest of the piece. While his writing is fairly conversational, this is the only time Bruni slips into the second tense with the words "let's" and "you". The piece would have been stronger and more even if he hadn't included this line.
I haven’t blogged about the National Popular Vote initiative for a while (not since June!), for which I apologize—or for which I acknowledge your gratitude, whichever applies. A lot’s been going on, some positive (Governor Jerry Brown signed the California bill, bringing the N.P.V. compact almost halfway to the trigger point of 270 electoral votes), some negative (though there is a lively, not entirely one-sided debate about the merits of N.P.V. in Republican circles, the R.N.C. passed a resolution denouncing it).
In the span of less than 100 words Hendrick Hertzberg excessively uses three very wordy parenthetical's. While I usually enjoy Hendrick's unique use of parenthetical's to add his own voice and thoughts to factual evidence, in this situation its becomes extremely repetitive and distracting. This defiantly threw off my reading rhythm because it caused me to have tangential thoughts. Because of this It was really hard for me to stay focused.
"Some people have been expecting me. Some claim they never knew they were foreclosed on or tell me that they have worked something out with their lender. Some won’t tell me a thing. If nobody is home, I have to determine where they are — at work, on vacation, in the Army, in jail, in a nursing home, dead or moved away. It isn’t easy." -Albert Clawson
This is a terrible hook. It is completely uninteresting and does not make me want to read on. Usually the "Lives" essays begin with a bang, some piece of wonderfully written and unique storytelling. Clawson's short sentence pattern is clearly an attempt to build up some sort of suspense in the reader, but at least for me, it was a failed one.
"Yet my interviews with protesters in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park seemed to rhyme with my interviews in Tahrir earlier this year."
It was hard to find something I did not like about Nicholas Kristof's writing, and I still like this sentence, but it is awkwardly worded. I feel like I know what idea Kristof is getting at by saying "rhyme" but it isn't totally clear. It was a good idea, but did not flow very well.
"With the advent of DVR, TiVo and a pile of other electrical boxes that allow people to control time through their televisions, advertisers have lost their grip on the attention span of American culture. Network TV alone lost over 2.5 million viewers since last year, and while audiences have proven that they're willing to watch shows on their own schedules, they are completely unwilling to watch the filler in between. " - Soren Bowie
These opening lines are uncharacteristically Soren Bowie. Unlike his usual sarcastic and sly beginning remarks, this opening line left me unimpressed. I read Bowie almost daily, expecting to be humored by his wittiness. Today, though, his writing was off - it was too informative and not catchy. I did not find this to be an effective beginning, as it did not maintain the more rudely funny tone that follows.
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