One does not often encounter sentences of 84-words in the leads of newspaper articles so I when I did today, I thought it worth consideration. If it were a perfect world \u2014 that is to say Faulknerian in its very essence, which would clearly demonstrate such literary mastery over such a great bevy of words \u2014 truly long-distance sentence casts would be magnificent examples of word smithery.<\/p>\n
But they are\u00a0not. And it is hardly a perfect world.<\/p>\n
I have written elsewhere in this virtual patch that a plethora of prepositional phrases is not a good thing. It makes for lumpy prose.<\/p>\n
Here is the 84-word lead, which appeared today:<\/p>\n
\u201cDrive east on Interstate 10 and then southeast on Highway 80, directly into the wild blue yonder, and you will find a rickety old ballpark with some lively baseball, played between guys down to their last at-bat in a game they love but does not always love them back, guys desperate to squeeze one more pitch out of their talent, guys willing to subsist on $50 a week and maybe a nice meal or two, just to get one last shot chasing the dream.\u201d<\/p>\n
There are a number of prepositional phrases in this runaway train, too many, to state\u00a0the obvious. There is a simple remedy for this problem, also obvious.<\/p>\n
Which brings to mind the well-worn quote from the legendary Turner Catledge, managing editor of The New York Times:<\/p>\n
\u201cThe composing room has an unlimited supply of periods available to terminate short, simple sentences.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
June Caldwell Martin comments:<\/p>\n
“But it tracks. And builds suspense.”<\/p>\n
One does not often encounter sentences of 84-words in the leads of newspaper articles so I when I did today, I thought it worth consideration. If it were a perfect world \u2014 that is to say Faulknerian in its very essence, which would clearly demonstrate such literary mastery over such a great bevy of words […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auslander.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auslander.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auslander.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auslander.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auslander.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1732"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/auslander.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1732\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1739,"href":"https:\/\/auslander.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1732\/revisions\/1739"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auslander.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auslander.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auslander.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}