Claim quote 'of the decade'
I found this one through Drudge, which didn't bother with attribution at all. (Guys, try not to make life in the editing classroom any trickier than it is, OK?) Those keeping up with the ongoing collision of electronic media with law, policy and practice might also be interested in the latest from the Dearborn McDonald's case.
Labels: heds
posted by fev at 7:49 AM
3 Comments:
With its predilection for multi-deck combined hed/standfirsts (hedfirsts?) the Mail does tend to go in for longer claim quotes than any other British paper (see also, further down the website today, "Property tycoon 'had three-year affair with his PA and asked her to arrange a threesome - then sacked her when his wife found out'".) The length wouldn't freak Mail readers out, but to have so many different sources collated into one set of quotes is quite impressive. But that's the power of the claim quote - once they see them, British readers do understand they have been duly forewarned to take what comes next provisionally at best.
Yep; horrible, isn't it? But I've no problem with understanding it or understanding what the claim quotes are implying.
Side issue: I'd have opened the quote after "he" and before "accidentally" but I'm not sure why. Any clues for me, Mr Latham?
Yes, I don't think including the pronoun in the quote was necessary for safety – and that would have meant one word less in quotes, anyway.
Another rather exotic aspect of this claim quote is that there's a fairly uncontroversial fact - 'at his luxury South Africa home' – mixed in there with all the suppositions and hearsay. To be really exact, perhaps that clause could have been moved outside the quotes and put at the end of the sentence.
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