They did, did they?
They called her the Mother Teresa of Genesis Park, so determined was she to feed the stomachs and spirits of the homeless in what was once one of Charlotte's meanest neighborhoods.
Two questions:
1) Who's "they"?
2) What evidence supports the assertion in the first clause?
This isn't as likely to raise eyebrows in a commemorative story, like an obit, as it might in something that made serious assertions about public opinion. But it's still dicey. If the only support for the "Mother Teresa" line is the subject's comment in an earlier interview (I'm having trouble tracking it down, but it seems her age was more precisely known than "in her early 60s" at that writing), we need to be a bit more careful about turning it into what "they called her." That's how one set of estimates can mushroom into "studies show"; the Guardian's ombud has a nice dissection of just such a phenomenon here.
Nice little pronouns shouldn't stray too far from their antecedents. Even when they think the angels are on their side.
Two questions:
1) Who's "they"?
2) What evidence supports the assertion in the first clause?
This isn't as likely to raise eyebrows in a commemorative story, like an obit, as it might in something that made serious assertions about public opinion. But it's still dicey. If the only support for the "Mother Teresa" line is the subject's comment in an earlier interview (I'm having trouble tracking it down, but it seems her age was more precisely known than "in her early 60s" at that writing), we need to be a bit more careful about turning it into what "they called her." That's how one set of estimates can mushroom into "studies show"; the Guardian's ombud has a nice dissection of just such a phenomenon here.
Nice little pronouns shouldn't stray too far from their antecedents. Even when they think the angels are on their side.
posted by fev at 10:33 PM
2 Comments:
Wow! Gold!
So often "they called her X" means "I think X is a cool hook", doesn't it?
This is odd: (from that Guardian piece):
In May the Poppy Project, a government-funded initiative that provides accommodation and support to women who have been trafficked into prostitution, published a report
I wanted the project's name to be "May the Poppy Project", despite the oddness of that.
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