How to improve writing (no. 60)

My son Ben thought I would like writing about this first sentence of a Reuters article:

A San Francisco-based driver for smartphone-based ride-hailing service Uber is an employee, not a contractor, according to a ruling by the California Labor Commission.

I see four problems:

1. The pile of phrasal adjectives. “San Francisco-based driver for smartphone-based ride-hailing service Uber” has the ungainliness of Hammacher Schlemmer headlines, though Reuters at least uses hyphens.

2. The repetition of -based with different meanings, which is at least slightly jarring. A driver may be based in a city, but the service isn’t based in a phone.

3. The lack of agency. Michael Harvey’s The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing suggests a crucial question to ask about a sentence: Who did what? Here the action — that a commission ruled — is buried in a phrase at the sentence’s end.

4. Too much material for a single sentence. The overloaded opening sentence is a symptom of journalese. (See also this post.)

My attempt at improvement:

The California Labor Commission ruled today that Uber driver Barbara Ann Berwick is an employee, not a contractor. Uber, a San Francisco-based company, markets a mobile app that allows users to arrange for transportation with drivers.

Some news stories describe the ruling as applying to all drivers. But it applies only to Berwick. Adding her name adds clarity. I’m not happy about “San Francisco-based.” I’d prefer “a San Francisco company,” but that phrasing might suggest that Uber is a local business. “San Francisco-based” at least beats “headquartered in San Francisco.” I thought it more important to identify Uber (rather than Berwick) as based in San Francisco. The driver’s location could come in later in the story.

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

[This post is no. 60 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

Today’s Zippy

Reading Zippy is more fun that The Waste Land — all the hidden references! Today’s strip channels the 1948 film They Live by Night.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Moby-gibberish

I read a partial sentence in a dream this morning and wrote it down when I woke up: “from whence the initials carved into the surface of the whale rendered the ship a perennial Sea Hag.”

The obvious inspiration: chapter 68 of Moby-Dick, which describes a sperm whale as covered with “numberless straight marks” that appear to be “engraved upon the body itself.” Ishmael compares these marks to hieroglyphics. The Sea Hag sailed in from another fictional world: Popeye’s.

I have also dreamed an oracular remark from a Paris Review interview and sentences from The Elements of Style. And once, long ago, a passage from an unpublished poem by David Jones. I wish I had written that one down.

Reader, do you read in dreams?

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

Quoggy

Text from Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851). Image from the collective unconscious.

Also from Moby-Dick
“Nothing exists in itself”
Nantucket ≠ Illinois

[Quoggy : a spelling of quaggy , “Of flesh, a body, etc.: soft, yielding, flabby. Also fig .” (Oxford English Dictionary ). The Dictionary cites Melville’s sentence.]

From The American Language

Text from H. L. Mencken, The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States, 4th ed. (New York: Alred A. Knopf, 1936). Image from the collective unconscious.

Also from The American Language
“There are words enough already”

Nantucket ≠ Illinois

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851):



Also from Moby-Dick
“Nothing exists in itself”

Bloomsday 2015

It is Bloomsday. James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922) begins on June 16, 1904, and ends in the early hours of the following day. Here is a passage from “The Oxen of the Sun,” the novel’s fourteenth episode. The setting is a maternity hospital, where a Mrs. Purefoy is in labor, and where Stephen Dedalus and medical-student friends carouse. In Joyce’s schema for Ulysses, the technic of “The Oxen of the Sun” is “embryonic development”: the episode is written in shifting styles that chronicle the development of English prose, ending in parody, slang, slurred speech, and the language of an American revival preacher: “The Deity ain’t no nickel dime bumshow.” It is getting late (“Keep a watch on the clock”), and Stephen Dedalus and company are very drunk:


[From the Modern Library edition (1961).]

Other Bloomsday posts
2007 (The first page)
2008 (“Love’s Old Sweet Song”)
2009 (Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses)
2010 (Leopold Bloom, “water lover”)
2011 (“[T]he creature cocoa”)
2012 (Plumtree’s Potted Meat)
2013, 2013 (Bloom and fatherhood)
2014 (Bloom, Stephen, their respective ages)

Recently updated

Eberhard Faber IV, Purée Mongole The story behind the Mongol name turns out to be apocryphal.

RZ, i.m.

[Lines from the Percy Bysshe Shelley poem “With a guitar. To Jane.” The guitar that Shelley gave to Jane Williams is in the Bodleian Library. All details there.]

This post is in memory of my friend Rob Zseleczky, who died at this time two years ago. He was a guitarist, and a poet, and his favorite poet was Shelley. We toasted to Rob’s memory last year on this night, and we’ll toast to his memory again tonight.

“In the Nostalgia District”

Mike Brady has been out looking for Marcia’s diary, which little Cindy donated to a book drive. Oops. But Mike is making progress: “It’s at one of the used-book stores downtown,” he says. ”I don’t know which one. I’ve checked a number of them.” And he still has “a handful,” as he puts it, to go. Such a handful that he and Carol divide them up to continue the search.

Where do these people live? Their townful of books reminds me of Roz Chast’s cartoon “In the Nostalgia District.”

A related post
Canned Heat and the Brady Bunch (No kidding)

[Dialogue from The Brady Bunch episode “The Possible Dream,” February 27, 1970.]