Here’s a sentence brought me up short. From The New Yorker, December 23, 2019, page 69:
Buttigieg can give a thoughtful answer to almost any question, but he rarely tells a joke or heartfelt accounts of the people he meets on the trail.
Do you see the problem? You can tell a joke, but you cannot tell an account. Well, you can if you really want to, but you’d be writing decidely unidiomatic English. “He told a joke and heartfelt accounts”: yikes. From 1800 to 2018, Google’s Ngram Viewer shows no results for
tell an account or
told an account.
So — make sure that verbs and their objects go together:
Buttigieg can give a thoughtful answer to almost any question, but he rarely tells a joke or shares heartfelt accounts of the people he meets on the trail.
I’d tweak a little more:
Buttigieg can give a thoughtful answer to almost any question, but he rarely tells a joke or shares a heartfelt story about someone he’s met on the trail.
I’ll leave the extra changes to speak for themselves.
Related reading
All OCA
“How to improve writing” posts (Pinboard)
[The sentence has the same problem in
the online version of the article. This post is no. 86 in a series, dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]