How to improve writing (no. 78)

I’m reading Harold Evans’s Do I Make Myself Clear? A Practical Guide to Writing Well in the Modern Age (2017). It’s the work of a prominent journalist and editor whose prose is often graceful and witty. But there are odd lapses: missing referents, errors of fact, paragraphs and chapters that veer off in new directions. (I dare anyone to explain what happens toward the end of chapter four.) And there’s verbal clutter: “This is the laconic way he writes at the opening of an essay.” Better: “He begins laconically.” And what the hey is “the modern age”?

Perhaps most disappointing: Evans’s revisions of other people’s prose too often seem surprisingly clunky. Here is one example from the chapter “The Sentence Clinic.” The sentence in need of repair is from a 2014 Wall Street Journal article about Barack Obama:

The president, detached and defeatist when he isn’t in your face and triumphalist, let David Remnick, in the New Yorker interview people keep going back to as the second term’s Rosetta Stone, know that he himself does not expect any major legislation, with the possible exception of immigration, to get done.

Evans says that the sentence has “a hole in the middle” (unexplained), and he calls attention to the gap between David Remnick’s name and know. Here is Evans’s revision:

The president, detached and defeatist when he isn’t in your face and triumphalist, suggested, in a David Remnick interview in the New Yorker, that he does not expect any major legislation to pass, with the possible exception of immigration. People have viewed the interview as the Rosetta Stone of the second term.

Yet this revision preserves, unremarked, the gap between president and a verb (suggested) and adds a gap between suggested and that. There’s something awkward about having the participle detached and the verb suggested in close proximity. The rhyme of viewed and interview seems a distraction. And that long first sentence with parts rearranged — it’s still a clunker. Here’s my revision:

When he is not in your face and triumphalist, the president seems detached and defeated. In an interview with David Remnick of The New Yorker, Obama suggested that he does does not expect any major legislation to pass, with the possible exception of immigration. Many observers see in this interview the key to understanding his second term.

First, a statement. Second, evidence to support that statement. Third, a comment on the importance of the evidence. I omitted the Rosetta Stone metaphor, as it suggests the deciphering of a mystery, not at all what’s involved in reading an interview. But I’d like to take greater liberties with the WSJ ’s prose and revise like so:

When he is not in your face and triumphalist, the president seems detached and defeated. In a New Yorker interview that many observers see as the key to understanding his second term, Obama suggested that he does not expect any major legislation to pass, with the possible exception of immigration.

Or better still:

When he is not in your face and triumphalist, the president seems detached and defeated. In a New Yorker interview that many observers see as the key to understanding his second term, Obama suggested that with the possible exception of immigration, he does not expect any major legislation to pass.

In The Elements of Style, the derided but still sometimes useful William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White have advice that’s helpful in approaching the WSJ sentence:

When you become hopelessly mired in a sentence, it is best to start fresh; do not try to fight your way through against the terrible odds of syntax. Usually what is wrong is that the construction has become too involved at some point; the sentence needs to be broken apart and replaced by two or more shorter sentences.

In this case, three sentences. Or, with the reference to David Remnick removed, two.

Related reading
All OCA “How to improve writing” posts (Pinboard)

[DuckDuckGo tells me that the original sentence is by Peggy Noonan. I’m on page 141 of Do I Make Myself Clear?, with 293 pages to go. The passage from The Elements of Style is by E.B. White. This post is no. 78 in a series, dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]