Vanity Fair Edits Sarah Palin!

Vanity Fair, how I love you.  I recently lamented the terrible writing in Sarah Palin’s resignation, but didn’t have the time, fortitude, or red ink to edit it.  Vanity Fair had all three.  Read their edit here.

Enjoy!  If you are a grammar geek like me, you can consider it a mini-holiday.

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Update:  Thank you, Jeff, for this link.  I actually find diagramming sentences to be therapeutic, but you might not all agree.   But it is enlightening.  My favorite part of it is this sentence, when the author is trying to diagram a particularly twisted sentence:

“I had to give up. This sentence is not for diagramming lightweights. If there’s anyone out there who can kick this sucker into line, I’d be delighted to hear from you. To me, it’s not English—it’s a collection of words strung together to elicit a reaction, floating ands and prepositional phrases (“with that vote of the American people”) be damned. It requires not a diagram but a selection of push buttons.”

Sarah Palin’s Resignation Tragedy

Judging by the comments from my last post, only a third of my readers will stop reading an article if the writer employs bad grammar or punctuation.  The other two-thirds might judge the writer or criticize him or her, but will continue to read. 

Following that, I just have to wonder what you all think of this piece of writing.   The link is to Sarah Palin’s speech announcing that she’s resigning as Governor of Alaska.  I’ve been meaning to write about it for days, but the flu has kept me from it.  I must thank my dear friend Brendan for pointing out what a tragedy of the English language it is.  (If you enjoyed the SNL Tina Fey skits from the election, please go read the speech in its entirety.  I don’t think any comedy was intended, but it sure is easy to find in it.)

 Sarah Palin gave this speech as governor.  She has a college degree, a staff who could have written for this her, and what I can only assume is access to several proofreaders.  Yet we end up with many sections like this:

“Alaska’s mission – to contribute to America. We’re strategic in the world as the air crossroads of the world, as a gatekeeper of the continent. Bold visionaries knew this – Alaska would be part of America’s great destiny.
Our destiny to be reached by responsibly developing our natural resources. This land, blessed with clean air, water, wildlife, minerals, and oil and gas. It’s energy! God gave us energy.”

Yes, God gave us energy.  And man gave us grammatical rules and tools.  But Gov. Palin gave us sentence fragments, run-on sentences, and superfluous punctuation marks.  Right here, in the following two sentences, she shows a blazing disregard for verbs:  ”Our destiny to be reached by responsibly developing our natural resources. This land, blessed with clean air, water, wildlife, minerals, and oil and gas.”

I won’t go into how ridiculous I think her argument is that staying in office her full term would be just “politics as usual.”  I promise.  It’s killing me, of course, but I don’t want to distract from the blatantly bad writing that is her resignation speech.  It’s just bad writing, people.  I started to get out my red pen and my Google Docs to share some fun with you, but I didn’t have the strength.  Where would I even start?  Would it just be editing to correct for punctuation errors?  That would take a while.  Then there would be the lack of subjects and predicates in any logical relation to each other.  Or would I try to get into style? I couldn’t get into style, of course.  I am too far away from her politics and mindset to try to give her style tips.

I realize, of course, that this is the transcript of a speech, and some politicians take artistic license with speeches.  But what artistic value is served in the next sentence? “So much success in this first term – and with this success I am proud to take credit… for hiring the right people!”  Why the dash?  Why the ellipses?   And even if it is a speech transcript, it’s posted on the State of Alaska’s website.  Doesn’t that deserve proofreading?

I don’t have a lot of points I’m trying to make here.  I’m just trying to say that our elected officials should pay attention to the elementary grammar rules we were all taught in grade school.  Is that asking so much?

So, What Else is Going On?

Just wanted to let you all know that I’ve created a new blog.  I’ll still be judging your grammar here, don’t worry.  But if you’re interested, you can also read about the treatment my doc is putting me on to make sure my abdominal pain is gone for real.

I’ll warn you that I’m going to be talking about some girl stuff over there, and I plan to be pretty candid.  So Pausing For Six Months might not be for everyone.  But you are welcome to take a look. 

Back to grammar soon, I promise.

Laid Up, Then Laid Off

Hello, readers!  I’m back from my convalescence.  Surgery went well, and the pain that has been plaguing me for the past five months should be behind me now.  I’m feeling better, we have a treatment plan, and I’m already full of more energy than I’ve had all year.

So then yesterday my employer laid me off.  Ouch.  I got a nice severance package, though, and I’m taking a few days of R & R before starting the job search in earnest on Tuesday.  (Monday is FilmChris’ birthday, so that day will be spent doing things that make him happy, like watching movies and playing video games.  You know, normal 12-year-old boy stuff.)

I’m making big plans for the next few weeks, to take advantage of time off and good health.  I plan to finish editing the book, writing more blog posts, and reading more great books.  But right now, I need to finish unpacking boxes from this move before the boxes from my desk show up.

Sloppiness

My apartment tends to be sloppy.  I hate it, because I feel like general sloppiness leads to intellectual sloppiness.  So it’s a constant battle to keep clutter at bay, cobwebs swept away, and dishes clean.   It bugs me, but I am able to get past it and live my life.  (I’m certainly not a Neat Freak, nor is Film Chris. ) 

But what really drives me to drink is sloppiness in writing.  I don’t mean that when you write on my Facebook wall, I’m going to call you on your grammar.  (I will try really hard not to.   I promise.)  The writing I’m talking about is formal writing.  Business letters, e-mails, news articles, and (yes) blogs demand a higher standard of writing, in my opinion.   Sloppy writing means sloppy thinking, to me. 

So imagine how disappointed I was to read this article today and find the following sentences.

“The one drawback is that the OS is a pretty stripped-down, a Linux core with a web browser and a video playback client, and little else. No productivity suite, and possibly no potential for add-on applications at all.”

Now, this is a blog.  I get that.  I get that when it comes to blogs, columns, and other less hard-news type writing, there is room for artistic license.  I love when writers personalize their writing through style, cadence, and original thinking.  Sometimes that means bending a couple of grammar rules.  So keeping that in mind, maybe the second sentence wouldn’t drive everyone else as batty as it drives me.  But I really like complete sentences.  I really like subject and predicate combinations. 

It might also not drive me as crazy if the first sentence were correct.  There’s an extra article in there (a) and I’m not even sure which one the writer would keep.  “”The one drawback is that the OS is pretty stripped-down, a Linux core with a web browser and a video playback client, and little else. “  Or, the writer might have intended: “The one drawback is that the OS is a pretty stripped-down, Linux core with a web browser and a video playback client, and little else. “

I don’t know the writer’s intent, but I’m not terribly impressed by the writer, based on this post.  (Nor am I impressed by the editor.)  And if I’m not impressed, I likely won’t go back and read future posts.  And isn’t the repeat visitor the holy grail of blogging? 

You might be rolling your eyes and saying I’m being too hard on poor Christopher Null.  But Mr. Null has a public blog on an advertiser-based site.  He wants me to read his work, and he wants me to read a lot of it.  If his writing is sloppy, I may not.  Sloppy writing?  Sloppy thinking.  (That was artistic license there, the two phrases without verbs.)

Maybe I just like grammar too much.  You can call me a Grammar Neat Freak, because I’ve surely never been accused of being an actual Neat Freak.

Oh Boy, I Didn’t Write This

I aspire to be considered a writer. 

Doing what people do, I used an Internet search engine to see what comes up with my name.  My Facebook profile, Linked In profile, nothing much.  But then I saw a link to Poetry.com, with a poem called “Rain.”  I scratched my head, wondering if I wrote that.  So I clicked on it to read it.

I want you all to know, this is not my poem.

I’m not a poetry critic, just a one-time amateur poet.  But I want you to know I didn’t write that poem.