Today we have rearranging of parts. From a New York Times opinion piece, a sentence that needs improvement:
Harding, the former Moscow bureau chief of The Guardian, has been reporting on shady characters like Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman who was indicted last month, long before Trump announced his candidacy.I see two problems:
“Last month, long before Trump announced his candidacy” makes for a momentary muddle. Place “long before Trump announced his candidacy” at the beginning of the sentence, and you can see the second problem more clearly:
Long before Trump announced his candidacy, Harding, the former Moscow bureau chief of The Guardian, has been reporting on shady characters like Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman who was indicted last month.See the problem? It’s a matter of tense: Long before x did y, Harding has been reporting. I suspect that the original arrangement of the sentence’s parts allowed the writer to miss this now-obvious error. Once more:
Long before Trump announced his candidacy, Harding, the former Moscow bureau chief of The Guardian, was reporting on shady characters like Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman who was indicted last month.I’d say bring back the copy desk, but I don’t think copy editors edit opinion pieces. (Anyone know?)
Related reading
All OCA “How to improve writing” posts (Pinboard)
[This post is no. 73 in a series, dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose. I’ve added italics to the name of The Guardian in the Times sentence.]
comments: 4
People who aren't writers tend to write sentences like this, I've noticed . . .
I think that we can all write sentences like this one when we’re not paying enough attention. Take a look at the writer’s credentials. I wonder what the books are like.
At the newspapers I worked for, copy editors would edit opinion pieces for grammar, usage and punctuation. We tried not to interfere with what people were trying to say. That system led to some interesting discussions about fairness. Some people would accuse the editors of holding up timely letters over quibbles. You can see the flip side of that argument by reading unedited rants on the Internet. Most of the writers are passionate, but their unedited work is confusing, rather than convincing. Our arguments about the public good should be sharp and precise. Today, they are often bewildering.
“You can see the flip side of that argument by reading unedited rants on the Internet”: that makes me think of my local paper, which edits letters for spelling only. Lots of the bewildering on the letters page. :)
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