Stunning and excessive restraint

So the local constabulary is being sued by a nearby-ish resident who contends that (a) he was unconstitutionally roughed up by the cops after he was thrown out of a sports bar on St. Patrick's Day and (b) he wasn't the guy who should have been thrown out in the first place. Our concern is with the second sentence here:

The lawsuit states that one officer used a Taser on (plaintiff) while multiple other officers tried to take him to the ground in a “horse-collar-type maneuver.” According to the lawsuit, the stunning and excessive restraint continued as officers pinned (plaintiff) on the ground.

The sentence at hand isn't in any way ungrammatical or wrong, Its problem, like many of the "wrong" sentences you'll encounter in daily life, is that it's right about several things at once. It doesn't exclusively mean that the restraint is considered both stunning and excessive, but that certainly is one of the things it means. And that's why we do editing: the art of asking "what did you say?" and "what did you mean?" by way of trying to reduce the dissonance between the two.

An editing textbook that claims to have "the" right answer, of course, is blowing smoke. There are a bunch of right answers. You could make clearer that "stunning" is a noun by flipping the subjects: "the excessive restraint and stunning continued." Or you could add another determiner: "The stunning and the excessive restraint continued." Or -- gasp! -- you could go ahead and admit that "taser" (or Taser, or taze) is a verb: "the tasing and excessive restraint continued." Which of those, if any, is the best answer is a matter of judgment. But all of them are less ambiguous than "stunning and excessive restraint."

That's a lot of space and time spent on a small sentence in a small paper. But editing, like baseball, is about a lot of small stuff done right over a long season. Most plays don't make the highlights on the evening news, because most plays involve moving your feet a few steps one way or the other; the batter is set down, all's right with the world, and your side goes into the dugout to try to score a few. Do small things right, and eventually big things will follow.

I mixted you a metąphor

Somehow, I think we're missing the point here:

Hamtramck — It's Black Friday for foodies.

It's a last taste of decadence before a season of denial and penance.

It's Fat Tuesday. Paczki Day, as Metro Detroiters know it.

I'm not bothered by likening a Tuesday to a Friday, but Black Friday seems like the wrong one for a "last taste of decadence before a season of denial." Nor (having had two last night and one this morning) am I convinced that paczkis* are the stuff "foodies" are made of.
 But it wouldn't be a holiday without a little excess writering in the press, would it?

* Like both local papers, I kind of go both ways on how to pluralize it.

Before the ball was over

I hope this is one an editor missed, because the alternative -- it's one an editor inserted -- would be a sign of the End Times.

How do things like "but not after enduring a wild few days that started with a sudden cancellation of the whole program by Wayne County Community College District" go wrong? Hard to say. but it looks like shifting gears in mid-thought. A clause took shape on the screen, and somebody thought "well, of course she couldn't have gone back to class before the turmoil," and the poor little "but not" went unnoticed.
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Poorly attached modifier of the week

What are those pesky American officials up to now, The Washington Examiner?

Suspected for years of plotting to dismantle the U.S. electric grid, American officials have confirmed that Iranian military brass have endorsed a nuclear electromagnetic pulse explosion that would attack the country's power system.

Can we get a ruling from the Fellowship of the Predicative Adjunct?

Fill in the clean

Hey, kids! Here's a comment from one of your fellow readers. Do you want to rush right over to his blog, owing to his awesome rock sensibilities, or can you point to, oh, four or five problems (mostly lexical, some syntactic) that make you think otherwise?

However that's not to say I do not try, on occasion, to seek out something comparatively new that doesn't make me feel like gagging up my Ensure. I definitely do not trust what anyone says a few new band or a brand new sound or a brand new concept, particularly if that individual is young enough and inexperienced sufficient to suppose that “a brand new idea” is 4 totally different chords in a single tune.

I am not the type to rummage through iTunes or go out to a membership to listen to one other variation on three guitar players and a ham-fisted drummer bellowing one thing about how disaffected they're with ____________ (fill in the clean).

With apologies to the poor writer whose piece was cannibalized by our spammer -- thanks, mysterious porn-blog-in-China owner! I can complain ad nauseam about the evils of patchwriting and get nothing but vacant stares, but you've shown why it makes the practitioner look not only dishonest but sublimely dumb.

Sentence of the morning

Back story: Popular restaurant on Woodward, formerly an auto repair shop, has bought some houses to knock down for a parking lot, and some neighbors aren't happy:

Guirey and his neighbors say they believe that the lot will drop their property values faster than Vinsetta Garage diners order french fries and cheese curds with their beer and custard milkshakes.

You might be asking exactly how fast that is. Or you might be asking if that's what the retired auditor and his neighbors actually said. (A widely followed if usually unwritten journalistic peeve holds that you can never write about what people "think," only what they "say they think"; here, it collides with another peeve, which holds that you "believe" in, e.g., the power of love but "think" about parking and property values.) You might even be wondering who exactly thought a pop-up link from "french fries" to a Big Mac ad seemed like a good idea. But you can at least be grateful that some hyphen-obsessed editor downtown didn't decide to create a "beer-and-custard milkshake."

Love's throbbing deadline

Let's say there are a couple of ways you could talk about a $400 million-plus deal in which the print wing of the Murdoch empire agrees to buy a really smart and diverse multilingual publishing house. You could, for example, be interested in what the old fox is up to, or in the general state of media consolidation in the US and Canada. Or you could, you know, be all writerly:
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A tarantula on a slice of angel food

The game was as taut as the preceding paragraphs. 

Raymond Chandler's dead. Throw strikes.

In this grinder, there came a display of the lineup depth that makes these the highest-scoring teams in the American League: When have you seen a 2-1 game in which the Nos. 9 hitters drove in all the runs?

"Nos. 9 hitters" could be the awesomest Safire plural in the history of the world in space. Do writers actually do this to themselves, or was the copydesk making the new guy carry the grammar bags back to the hotel or something?
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Oh, the inanity

Q: Are there cities other than Detroit that can regularly contend for the coveted Unhinged 1A Sports Prose trophy?
A: Yes.
Q: What would be some examples?
A: Listen and attend:

This Miami Heat team is so great.

So very, very great.
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Why we teach this stuff

People still ask, especially when we're getting ready to take the whole curric- ulum apart and see if we can fit it back together in some plausibly 21st-century way, whether we ought to keep on teaching those annoying grammar terms. (Especially the test.) Isn't there other stuff we ought to be teaching instead, and do you really have to know all that pluperfect stuff to be a journalist anyway?

Well -- no. You don't. Indeed, there are large parts of journalism in which diagramming seems a pretty low-order skill. But if you want to traffic in the written parts, you can't go too long before that pesky grammar comes in handy. You might want to keep someone from doing something boneheaded to your copy, for example. Or you might want to talk one of your writerly friends out of writing him- or herself into a corner -- in a way that keeps you from having to fix the same mistake again and again and again. Or you might find yourself on the receiving end of a rant like this, delivered to the AP Stylebook's Ask The Editor feature:

Q: ... Here's another question: Someone makes comments; the comments don't come or go anywhere, do they? Who teaches this form of formulaic and idiomatic but nonsense writing? It seems to be more prevalent than it was only a few years ago, but it's irritating to this copy editor. (AP story) "Haley's remarks came after the Budget and Control Board, a financial oversight panel she chairs, agreed without discussion to require the Department of Transportation to provide more details of a summer financial meltdown that left contractors with invoices unpaid for months." – from Arlington, Va. on Mon, Sep 26, 2011
A: Point taken. The passive voice and complex structure make the sentence unduly challenging. I suspect we're all guilty of this at times.

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Getting it backward

That's a strange way to begin an argument for putting Alex Avila on the All-Star team, isn't it?

Making an argument for Alex Avila to get a spot on this year's All-Star team is simple: There isn't one. Or there shouldn't be.

The Tigers' 24-year-old catcher enjoys a hefty lead in nearly every offensive category at his position in the American League. In fact, his closest competition is the guy who gives him a day off every once in a while -- Victor Martinez.

One of the advantages of having a full-strength, in-house copydesk is that the editors get used to the writers and their peculiar ways of painting themselves into corners. (Your shop probably had its own versions of Libel Guy and Mangled Cliche Woman.) Here's a lede from last Sunday's sports front to help put today's into context:

Sparky Anderson is widely believed to have said this: "A baseball manager is a necessary evil."

The legendary manager of the Tigers and Cincinnati Reds no doubt believed that when he said it. For his sake, few who watched him do.

What would that last passage look like if you translated it from English to Afrikaans to Serbian and back to English? Let's ask Google:

The legendary manager of the Tigers and Cincinnati Reds no doubt believed that if he did not say. For him, a couple that looked at.

I think I like the new one better. Perhaps Google Translate would be a good coaching technique.

SUNDAY Q&A:
Q: So how bad could it get if Mitch Albom decides to take on Those Pesky Atheists?
A: Very, very bad.

Cliche corner: Calling in the experts

I guess so. On the other hand, you could be wondering if you can gnaw your own leg off and escape before the writer manages to come up with a third cliche for this miserable lede.

The online version, should you be scoring along at home, is different for no apparent reason:

When you run into your worst nightmare, what are the chances it will also be someone else’s finest hour?

That, I think, suggests why this is such a singularly awful piece of writing. It really doesn't matter what order the words go in, or whether they form a question or a declaration. The Freep has decided that the best way to handle this story on Wednesday (the accident in question did close one of the interstates during rush hour, but that was Monday) is to let an editorial writer ruminate about it on the front page. And from that no good can come.

Any story of this nature -- the "news" version inside manages to use "Good Samaritan" four times, nearly all of them spelled correctly -- is likely to underscore the deeply ideological, persuasive nature of the news enterprise in general. As surely as the latest installment of the War On Christianity at Fox, this is a tale about how the world ought to be, rather than a report about what it is. If you put your dollar in the machine hoping for some news, you can be forgiven for asking why you were given a bedtime story instead. And why, if it must be a bedtime story, it couldn't be written with some minimal attention to form.

Today in really, really bad writing

But first, this word from the HEADSUP-L design desk:

1) Don't make yourself do the same thing twice.
2) Particularly, don't make yourself tease twice.
3) Just don't.

But on to the main course!

As the name "Rodriguez" sails quickly into the sunset, another name comes barreling in, splitting the maize-and-blue waters like a battleship.
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Today in bad writing

Yes, he might have. (Then again, you adepts of the Ancient and Mystic Order of the Then-Again Hed will note, he might not have.) But it's a sure bet he wasn't thinking it "when" the wallet was stolen, because he wasn't there. He was trying to pull people out of a building, and he'd left his wallet in his (unlocked) car.

The print version is marginally improved over the online one:

A Dearborn firefighter might have been thinking that no good deed goes unpunished when his wallet was stolen while he was helping with the rescue effort in Wayne last week.

... because the reader isn't left quite as far out to sea as by "the rescue effort in Wayne." But we're still missing the main point. The main justification for writing a second-cycle lede is that there has been a first cycle. This story's new to me. Why not tell it in a way that emphasizes what happened, rather than the writer's facility with cliches?

Out-of-tune lede of the day

Writers hate to be told that their heartbreaking bursts of alliteration don't work, but -- better before publication than after publication, don't you think?

I don't think all those verbs can coordinate with "Saturday." Being loved in general is one thing; being loved on a specific day is several others.

If you've kept up with the Edwards family, you can probably figure out what the dangling phrase at the end is up to. Otherwise, good luck.

Inch less foam! Inch more beer!

Where do people get the idea that they ought to write like this? And why do otherwise reasonable adults let them get away with it?

Who was that masked man I saw you with last night?

That was no masked man; that was first-time officeholder and political outsider Gov.-elect Rick Snyder!

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Metaphor(s) of the week

Cancer is cured, peace breaks out across the Fractious Near East, and ZOMG Detroit is poised to become the Greatest Sports City in the history of the world in space!

Naturally this front-page-dominating event calls for reams of analysis by all the best columnists, producing this splendid burst of metaphoric cliche overload:

First, a couple of caveats. This cake ain't baked yet. If the two parties can't seal a deal in 30 days, Mrs. D can hit the reset button. And yes, the Detroit economy remains mired in muck, making any financial gambit a bit of a crapshoot.

Once you find the reset button on the cake, you might want to look up "gambit." It's a crapshoot almost by definition: an offer of material in return for a potential advantage in space or time. Grrr.

On the bright side, at least no one appears to have left the cake out in the rain.

Don't do any of this

F

First rule: Never do no G-droppin' in your heds.

Second rule: Never, ever make an exception to the first rule just because -- well, pickin'!

That's really the point here: pickin' isn't just a gratuitous bit of dialect ostentation. It's the first thing the lame writer finds when reaching into the "bluegrass" section of the cliche toolbag. And it's the first of several signs that the writer (to be fair, let's say "the paper," so we can throw in the line editor, the rimrat and the design desk too) isn't making any real effort to observe and reproduce some event from the real world in a way that would make people think, or wish, they'd been there.

The second sign is the online version of the hed (below the print version). Allow me to suggest* that if the same pickin' is hot and cool at the same time, somebody has an adjective problem. "Hot" and "cool" often mean hugely different things when you're talkin' about music, and nobody here seems to be botherin' to relate what was played to what's bein' written and shown. The video link starts with a nicely restrained version of "The Old Home Town" (here's a take by the 1988 BGBs for comparison, though as far as I know it's a Lester tune). That's not "hot," and it shouldn't be; if your banjo player starts nudging it up toward "Flint Hill Special" range, you either need a new banjo player or a skillet with which to whack the current one upside the head. But let's proceed to the text:

"You gonna have a pickin'?" an elderly man asked Vivian Hopkins as he passed through the store's open door.

"Yes, sir," she told him.

"Good, good," he nodded.

Three direct quotes, not a "said" in the bunch, and one patently illegal verb of attribution: "nodded." The writer's overplaying. You could do this whole sequence with only the first attribution.

... It's the kind of place that thickens a Southern drawl. [What does that even mean? No, really: What would it take for this to be true, and how to you propose to measure it, and what would it mean on the off chance it was true?] The kind of place where the only things moving faster than stomping feet are the mismatched paper fans people use to waft away the summer heat. [The writer's digging into the cliche bag, not watching the crowd. If there's a no-dancing rule, as the story says later, I want to know who's "stomping" -- and how fast, because that's going to help set the pace for the paper fans. The music is going to have one tempo, and that's going to cue a lot of the feet, and if the fans are faster than ... I mean, where's the guy with the video camera?]

... The pickers' fingers moved faster with familiarity when they began to play the classic "I'll Fly Away." But voices coming from the lawn chairs nearly overpowered them.

Sigh. Same thing. I don't think you're telling me what you saw, which means I don't think you saw very well. You mean they can't hold a tempo on a straight gospel tune? Are they playing it faster than "The Old Home Town"?  Do you mean they know it better? Or did the banjo player pick up a bunch of goofy left-hand stuff from Eddie Adcock that Earl simply doesn't bother with? You're alliterating, not reporting. But the talking lawn chairs are cool.

Well, enough of that. The Observer has traditionally been distinctly inept at writing about bluegrass.** Considering that Bill and Charlie Monroe cut their first sides in Charlotte, and considering how closely entwined the genre has always been with the southern Piedmont, and considering that the Observer has long prided itself on being an honest regional voice, that ought to be embarrassing. I think that's because the Observer never thought of bluegrass (unlike jazz or blues or mediocre Southern fiction) as something people actually do. It doesn't have rules and norms and standards -- the kind of things that would cue an open-eyed writer to the ways in which the Hot Club of Naptown and "hot pickin'" might actually have something in common. It's just something quaint that you send a feature writer out to watch every few years so you can say "pickin'" on the front page.

The cousins across campus wonder sometimes why journalists are such sloppy professionals when it comes to describing the social sciences. I think it's probably because we don't have a very good handle on how we ought to describe anything -- or, put another way, that we haven't yet learned to distinguish between "observing" and "slapping in a couple of cliches."

* Again, this is technically an "Orwellian" phenomenon, since Orwell warned against it. It's not entirely original to me.
** The N&O in Raleigh, an independent competitor for many decades before becoming a stablemate, has generally been far better.

Get a room, you two

Something about weather stories just brings out the cliche in everybody. Copyeds, this is your chance to step up and ... lose friends and influence people. Retire Mother Nature and Old Man Winter. And never, ever write or approve any piece of text containing the consecutive words "big chill."

Right, Houston?
The big chill is on

Little Rock?
State braces for big chill

Denver?
The big chill has returned to Colorado, courtesy of a strong cold front that roared through the region early Wednesday morning.

Asheville?
WNC's big chill persists as crews repair fractured waterlines

Sioux City?
Big chill, winds next for Siouxland

Scotland the brave?
Big chill tightens grip on UK

Memphis?
City agencies prepare for big chill

We could go on and on -- 700-some times. a search suggests. File this one so deep your best reporter couldn't find it.

Ghosts of textbooks past

Sometimes you can almost guess which skeletal page from which shroud-wrapped edition of which greisly textbook is sending tremors through the writers downtown.

Does "or more appropriate, Secret Santa" sound a little strange? The workbook-standard concept ended up as question 14 (part 4) on the first-round version of the old J110 style exam, on which you're supposed to change a sentence-initial "more importantly" to "more important." Why? Because, erm, well ... it's short for "what is more important," so it can't be the perfectly logical sentence adverb "more importantly." I mean, why go to the trouble of figuring out why people do what they do when you can follow the textbook and get the point?

Another one from today's A section:

With fewer than two weeks left in the year, the U.S. Senate on Saturday passed legislation that extends until the end of February eligibility deadlines for some key unemployment benefits.

Why "fewer than" two weeks? Because the book says numbers get "more than" and "fewer than"! One problem with that, though, is that we're not counting time in weeks here. "Fewer than two weeks" is one week or no weeks, not the 13 days that were (was?) on the clock when the lede was written. "Less than" isn't just idiomatic, it makes better sense -- but why make sense when you have a rule to follow?

And this:

For Monday, a 60% chance of snow exists.

Ever wonder why there's so much existing in news language? Might be a relic of the j-academy's occasional flirtation with General Semantics -- specifically, the part in which "be" verbs turn people into some sort of Whorfian zombies. Any reason not to say "there is" a particular chance of snow? Just the shadow of a textbook.

None of which is to say there's no editing at all downtown. Here's one from a wire story on the health care debate:

He also noted he successful­ly had fended off attempts to provide for a government-run insurance option to compete with private insurers.

Want to know what the AP sent?

He also noted he had successfully fended off attempts to provide for a government-run insurance option to compete with private insurers.

That's not the sort of adverb I'd spend a lot of time defending (when you fend something off, you succeed at fending it off), but moving the poor thing is a waste of editorial time with no conceivable improvement in the sentence. If you want to show me you're working, bring me the head of an "it's official." Or go over to the sports desk and cudgel the person who kept 'em from having a "celebrate"-free cutline day.