From a New York Times obituary for William Greenberg Jr., baker:
Mr. Greenberg, an affable redhead at 6 feet 4 inches tall who was raised in the Five Towns area of Long Island, opened his first bakery in Manhattan in 1946, in a narrow storefront on East 95th Street, near Second Avenue, with $3,000 — poker winnings from games he played in the Army. It turned out that Mr. Greenberg was as skilled with cards as he was with a piping gun.The logic of chronology is off here. To fix it:
It turned out that Mr. Greenberg was as skilled with a piping gun as he was with cards.That’s the kind of thing that the Times once employed lots of copy editors to fix.
I think there are far too many facts crammed into the first sentence — an unfortunate tendency in obituary writing. (See How to improve writing (no. 45).) Is mentioning Mr. Greenberg’s red hair and his height meant to entice the reader to keep going? Puh-leeze.
Related reading
All OCA How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)
[This post is no. 107 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]
comments: 2
I love this series.
A tiny thought:
I'd say "cake-decorating gun" or "cake-icing nozzle" or something besides "piping gun". I doubt many non-bakers know a piping gun is for decorating cakes. Also, I immediately heard "smoking gun", unsuitably noirish. :)
I agree with you. Or you could say “as skilled with cakes … cards.”
It always happens with sentences: make one change and it becomes clear that there should be others.
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