How to improve writing (no. 96)

I began turning the pages of the June 21, 2021 issue of The New Yorker. (It’s called catching up.) From an advertisement for Whitley Neill Gin:

The founder of Whitley Neill Gin, Johnny Neill, is the 8th generation in a family of gin masters going back to 1762. He has sourced 29 botanicals from around the world, creating an innovative and award winning range of gins.

Whitley Neill London Dry Gin, is distilled at the only distillery in the City of London itself. It is inspired by his travels to Africa and contains 9 botanicals including Cape Gooseberry and Boabab. Experience why Whitley Neill is the UK’s number one premium gin.

Best served in a highball with premium tonic, ice and garnished with a slice of orange.

It amazes me, though it shouldn’t, that a distiller who’s paid for a full-page ad in The New Yorker hasn’t paid adequate attention to this handful of sentences. Count the problems, just the glaring ones:

~ A missing hyphen.

~ An extraneous comma.

~ An unnecessary “itself.”

~ Two words without clear nearby referents.

~ A missing comma.

~ Unnecessary capital letters.

~ A misspelling.

Here, look:

The founder of Whitley Neill Gin, Johnny Neill, is the 8th generation in a family of gin masters going back to 1762. He has sourced 29 botanicals from around the world, creating an innovative and award[-] winning range of gins.

Whitley Neill London Dry Gin, is distilled at the only distillery in the City of London itself. It is inspired by his travels to Africa and contains 9 botanicals[,] including Cape Gooseberry and Boabab. Experience why Whitley Neill is the UK’s number one premium gin.

Best served in a highball with premium tonic, ice and garnished with a slice of orange.

I’d like to add a hyphen to “number one,” but Google’s Ngram Viewer shows me that “number one,” sans hyphen, as in “number one cause” and “number one hit,” is far more common. I’ll let that one go.

I see a number of problems beyond mechanics: “8th,” “9,” and “29” look to my eye a bit tacky in this fancy context. (What’s more impressive, “29 botanicals” or “twenty-nine botanicals”?) And Johnny Neill isn’t the eighth generation; he represents or is a member of an eighth generation. “He has sourced, . . . creating” doesn’t quite make sense: to source isn’t to create. “Ice and garnished” calls for revision. The more general invitation — “Experience why,” &c. — might make better sense at the end of the text. And the verb “taste” might make better sense than “experience.”

A larger problem: the disconnectedness of the sentences in the second paragraph. Try reading that paragraph aloud.

Better:

Johnny Neill is an eighth-generation gin master, carrying on a family tradition that began in 1762. As the founder of Whitley Neill Gin, he has sourced twenty-nine botanicals from around the world to create an innovative and award-winning range of gins.

Johnny’s travels to Africa inspired the creation of Whitley Neill London Dry Gin. Distilled at the only distillery in the City of London, it contains nine botanicals, including Cape gooseberry and baobab. Best served in a highball with premium tonic and ice, garnished with a slice of orange.

Taste why Whitley Neill is the UK’s number one premium gin.

Just in case a reader wonders whether I’ve misread some of the small print, here’s the misspelling of baobab. You can click for a better look:

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

[This post is no. 96 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]