How to improve writing (no. 88)

When you take care with writing, it’s difficult to stop. And so I found myself paying attention to these paragraphs on a box of Tetley British Blend tea bags:

Celebrating the True British Cuppa

Tetley Tea proudly celebrates 185 years of tea expertise in crafting the perfect brew. Known for its authentic British heritage, Tetley master blenders have lovingly created our best selling British Blend from the finest tea leaves around the world including Africa and Assam to give you a rich, bold and flavorful cup of authentic British style black tea. This robust, full bodied tea is perfect for your everyday pick me up.

Try it with a dash of milk for that royal experience!

It’s good strong tea, and it leaves a powerful tannin stain in the cup. But that’s pretty poor writing. “Proudly celebrates”: as opposed to “ashamedly celebrates”? “Known for its authentic British heritage”: a glaring dangling modifier. The clash of its and our presents a tricky problem of agreement. “Lovingly created”: oh please. “Around the world including Africa and Assam” sounds awkward. The march of adjectives — rich, bold, flavorful, robust, full bodied — is a bit much. That second sentence from beginning to end is unwieldy — try reading it aloud. And the first paragraph is short on hyphens, needing five to make things right. I can’t believe someone was paid to write this stuff.

Here’s my suggested revision, which fixes these problems and drops some of the hype:

Celebrating the British Cuppa

Tetley Tea celebrates its 185-year British heritage with the best-selling Tetley British Blend. Tetley master blenders bring together the finest tea leaves from Africa, Assam, and around the world to give you a rich, flavorful cup of authentic British-style black tea. Perfect for your everyday pick-me-up. Try it with a dash of milk for a royal experience.

I’ve let some of the nonsense (“cuppa” and “royal experience”) stand. But I’d suggest that my understated paragraph is far more British than Tetley’s original.

I remember a far simpler Tetley pitch: “I like those tiny little tea leaves in Tetley tea.” Yes, it was a simpler time.

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[This post is no. 88 in a series, dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

“Herd mentality”

If you missed the event in real time, Aaron Rupar has choice moments from last night’s ABC News Q & A with Donald Trump*.

A Scientific American endorsement

Scientific American has endorsed Joe Biden for president. An excerpt from the editors’ statement (which, of course, is worth reading in full):

Scientific American has never endorsed a presidential candidate in its 175-year history. This year we are compelled to do so. We do not do this lightly.

The evidence and the science show that Donald Trump has badly damaged the U.S. and its people — because he rejects evidence and science. The most devastating example is his dishonest and inept response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which cost more than 190,000 Americans their lives by the middle of September. He has also attacked environmental protections, medical care, and the researchers and public science agencies that help this country prepare for its greatest challenges. That is why we urge you to vote for Joe Biden, who is offering fact-based plans to protect our health, our economy and the environment. These and other proposals he has put forth can set the country back on course for a safer, more prosperous and more equitable future.

And I’ll add: As Scientific American recognizes, the choice of a candidate in this election goes far beyond any idea of “party.” As I see it, it’s really a choice between between democracy and autocracy, between sanity and psychosis, between truth and lies, between life and death.

End the Poll Tax

My friend Stefan Hagemann has created a GoFundMe project, End the Poll Tax. His goal — and why not? — is to raise $50,000 to pay fines and fees owed by Florida ex-felons. From Stefan’s description:

According to CNN, “Florida can bar ex-felons from voting if they owe court fines or fees associated with their convictions, even if they are unable to pay, a federal appeals court ruled Friday.

“The 6-4 ruling by the full 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a lower court’s ruling blocking the law.”

This decision affects more than 700,000 former felons, many of whom can not afford to pay fees and penalties averaging between $400.00 and $1000.00. Contrary to the Appeals court decision, this is evidently an updated version of the poll tax. The District Court judge who originally ruled in favor of former felons called the effort to force payment an “unconstitutional pay-to-vote system.”

Please consider making a contribution to Stefan’s counter-effort.

On a related note, the website Restore Your Vote should be helpful for anyone with a felony conviction, anywhere, who wants to vote. Let People Vote and Vote.org are helpful sites for anyone, anywhere, who wants to vote.

“What’s the Post Office Good For?”

From The New York Times, “What’s the Post Office Good For? Everything,” an illustrated report by Julia Rothman and Shaina Feinberg.

[Found via Matt Thomas’s Sunday New York Times Digest.]

Happy birthday, Orange Crate Art

My blog turns sixteen years old today. Surly teen, or studious young adult? Both? You decide.

Happy birthday, Orange Crate Art.

Idiot, traveler, chicken

Alexander Vindman, from an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg for The Atlantic:

I ask Vindman the key question: Does he believe that Trump is an asset of Russian intelligence?

“President Trump should be considered to be a useful idiot and a fellow traveler, which makes him an unwitting agent of Putin,” he says. Useful idiot is a term commonly used to describe dupes of authoritarian regimes; fellow traveler, in Vindman’s description, is a person who shares Putin’s loathing for democratic norms.

But do you think Russia is blackmailing Trump? “They may or may not have dirt on him, but they don’t have to use it,” he says. “They have more effective and less risky ways to employ him. He has aspirations to be the kind of leader that Putin is, and so he admires him. He likes authoritarian strongmen who act with impunity, without checks and balances. So he’ll try to please Putin.”

Vindman continues, “In the Army we call this ‘free chicken,’ something you don’t have to work for — it just comes to you. This is what the Russians have in Trump: free chicken.”

And:

“Authoritarianism is able to take hold not because you have a strong set of leaders who are forcing their way,” he says. “It’s more about the fact that we can give away our democracy. In Hungary and Turkey today, in Nazi Germany, those folks gave away their democracy, by being complacent.”

He goes on, “Truth is a victim in this administration, I think it’s Orwellian — the ultimate goal of this president is to get you to disbelieve what you’ve seen and what you’ve heard. My goal now is to remind people of this.”

Anne Fadiman on singular they

In Harper’s, Anne Fadiman writes about coming to terms with singular they :

For more than six decades, I’ve accepted without thinking that when we say that someone went to the store, we don’t have to specify whether that someone was old or young, rich or poor, fat or thin, tall or short, but we do have to specify whether the someone was a “he” or a “she.” Now I’m starting to think that’s a little weird.

My thinking about singular they has changed twice: first about the use of the word with an indefinite pronoun and again about the use of the word to refer to a non-binary person. A sentence of my own made me rethink things the first time. It was a radio commentary by Geoffrey Nunberg that made me rethink things a second time.

Thanks, Stefan, for pointing me to this essay.

Virginia Tufte (1918–2020)

The teacher and scholar Virginia Tufte has died at the age of 101. Her 2006 book Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style (recommended many times in these pages, often in contrast to far less impressive books) is a glorious exposition of the possibilities of the sentence.

Your Postal Service

[Your Postal Service, from The March of Time (1949).]

Please notice the Mongol pencil at 1:30. And do your best to ignore the ads.

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