How to improve writing (no. 126)
A conjunction that makes no sense.
How to improve writing (no. 124)
“What she did not say is that you can’t make friends of 50 years when you are in your ninth decade, the kind who knew you way back when.”
How to improve writing (no. 123)
Subject and verb should always agree. Sheesh, NY Times.
How to improve writing (no. 116)
The target of a plot is not at its center.
How to improve writing (no. 114)
A sentence from the NYT.
How to improve writing (no. 113)
A New York Times obituary opens with a sentence that tries to say too much.
How to improve writing (no. 112)
I made it almost through a New York Times article, and then I hit this single-sentence paragraph.
How to improve writing (no. 107)
Follow the logic of chronology.
How to improve writing (no. 106)
I was going to quote a sentence from The New York Times this morning until I realized how awful it was.
How to improve writing (no. 103)
A sentence in need of help, from a New York Times obituary for Margaret Keane, painter of big-eyed children.
How to improve writing (no. 102)
Diminutive but impactful? Nah.
How to improve writing (no. 101)
Put things where they belong.
How to improve writing (no. 100)
"It is unclear what the inspector general has done since then, in particular, whether the inspector general has referred the matter to the Justice Department”: a terrible sentence from The New York Times.
How to improve writing (no. 82)
When I read the news, I don’t go looking for things. They present themselves, and my sentence-repair alarm goes off.
How to improve writing (no. 81)
Even “breaking news,” as they call it, can wait another minute for writer(s) to get the sentences right.
How to improve writing (no. 64)
A bad sentence in The New York Times.
Subject-verb disagreement in the New York Times
In Garrison Keillor’s review of Deborah Solomon’s Norman Rockwell biography.
From The Onion? No, The Times.
“I have come to realize that my writing brain has been waiting for something exactly like today’s dizzyingly overfull, warp-speed Internet.”
Orange Crate Art: How to improve writing (no. 45)
To my eyes, the writer has crammed too many bits of information into one sentence — a problem one sees again and again in news writing.
Maureen Dowd, weaving, not linking
Maureen Dowd's cutting and pasting