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.]