There is a Reason for This, You Know
Posted on December 15th, 2009 in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »
It is not my intention to be mean, and if I ever met Amalie Benjamin in person, I’m sure I’d feel bad. I bet she’s a wonderful human being and probably she’s much nicer than I am.
But here is a reason why I repeatedly point out the bizarrely bad writing and flagrant grammatical errors in Amalie Benjamin’s writing. Two of them, actually.
The first is that I believe people should still demand good writing—or at the least, correct writing—especially in public fora. Just because there are a lot of McDonald’s in the world doesn’t mean we should settle for Big Macs.
The second is to remind people that the Globe used to be a fine newspaper and to remind people there, if anyone there reads this stuff, that some readers do care about writing and editing.
Okay. That said, Amalie Benjamin has some beauties in her story today about the Red Sox’s likely deal to acquire pitcher John Lackey.
I’ll just lay ’em out there—you can figure out the issues yourself.
He wasn’t ready to leave the game, a personality trait that would play well in Boston.
A step was taken to fill an outfield spot by agreeing to a deal with veteran Mike Cameron.
With Josh Beckett in the last year of his contract, the Sox are in a better position to negotiate with him, negotiations which may have already begun.
The 31-year-old righthander is second only in available players to Roy Halladay….
[Blogger: I have to interject—what does that mean?]
When Angels manager Mike Scioscia went to the mound to remove Lackey from Game 5 of the 2009 American League Championship Series, the pitcher yelled, “This is mine!’’ though he was taken out of the game.
How can newspapers expect to survive when they are so poorly written and edited?
Perhaps it’s just wishful thinking, but I long to believe that quality still matters.
5 Responses
12/15/2009 2:46 pm
Is it possible she’s in the vanguard of a new style of English writing — one in which subject, object, predicate, etc. are all mixed up together in an intoxicating, albeit disorienting, brew?
12/16/2009 8:34 am
“… and probably she’s much nicer than I am.” with all due respect Rich, I think that statement is probably a given
12/16/2009 8:45 am
Maybe it is like a TS Elliott poem where the the notes at the bottom of the page describing what the poem means are longer in content than the poem itself. In order to fully understand Ms Benjamin’s writing, it is necessary for bloggers like this one to interpret it.
12/16/2009 10:22 am
I have met Amalie several times and she is a very nice person. I suspect part of the problem with her writing is that she doesn’t have the time to work with her editor to address the problems that Rich has pointed out. In addition to her daily deadlines, she is also the Globe writer who updates the Red Sox blog and responds to the hundreds of reader questions that come in each day. Maybe it’s because she’s the youngest sports writer on the staff that she gets assigned all the digital duties in addition to her print responsibilities, but I think that might explain some of her troubles.
12/16/2009 10:32 am
That’s no excuse for the editor(s).