What a gold mine. A few days ago, a major online news outfit handed me a cornucopia of discussion topics in just two sentences: “In the past two weeks, overall arrests have fallen 66 percent compared to the same period last year. During that same time, traffic tickets and summons for minor offenses have fallen a whopping 94 percent year-over-year.”
Maybe you found more problems than I did, but here’s my hit list.
First sentence
Although “arrests have fallen” is not a serious error, we want “arrests fell.” “Have fallen” implies ongoing action, as in I have fallen on the ice twice this winter (and winter isn’t over, so I might slip again). But “in the past two weeks” gives a frame of reference that has ended, so “overall arrests fell” is right.
Lack of parallel structure can be hard to catch, but when we write “compared to” we know we need to make sure the comparative items are expressed similarly. Oops. “Overall arrests” is not parallel with “same period.”
So here are a couple of ways to rewrite the first sentence:
In the past two weeks, overall arrests fell 66 percent compared to arrests in the same period last year.
In the past two weeks, overall arrests totaled just 34 percent of arrests in the same period last year.
Second sentence
Comprehending statistics is hard enough without the ambiguous lead-in “During that same time.” What is meant by “same time”? The two-week period a year ago, the two weeks that just ended, or the one year we are using for comparison purposes? Let’s keep it simple and say nothing about time. We’ve already established our framework.
Then “year-over-year,” at the end of the sentence, restates what was intended by “During that same time,” so we have redundancy. And by the way (is your head pounding yet?), “year-over-year” shouldn’t be hyphenated when it comes after the thing it’s describing. When a phrase like that precedes what it’s describing (year-over-year comparisons), the hyphens are correct, but not when the phrase follows.
We also have “summons” as a plural, but it’s one summons and two summonses, right? True, we don’t have many pairings like lens and lenses, but because we’d say a summons, we should have a sixth sense that the plural is summonses.
And now, drum roll please, we have the fun finale: “a whopping 94 percent.” For this concluding complaint we quote Edwin Newman (1919–2010), the popular NBC reporter who wrote and spoke about proper use of our language and expressed many of his observations in the bestseller Strictly Speaking: Will America Be the Death of English. In his book Newman held up hackneyed phrases like “whopping wage increases” for scorn, asking, “When does a wage increase begin to whop?” Or, to magnify his point, if 94 percent is a dramatic statistic on its own, why do we need “whopping”?
Our second sentence, therefore, might read better like this:
Even more striking, traffic tickets and summonses for minor offenses fell 94 percent.
Now let’s put all our refinements together:
In the past two weeks, overall arrests fell 66 percent compared to arrests in the same period last year. Even more striking, traffic tickets and summonses for minor offenses fell 94 percent.
We all make mistakes when we write, but when we fail to put adequate effort into editing and proofing, the error count can become embarrassing.
In addition to presenting workshops on writing in the workplace, Norm Friedman is a writer, editor, and writing coach. His 100+ Instant Writing Tips is a brief “non-textbook” to help individuals overcome common writing errors and write with more finesse and impact. Learn more at http://www.normfriedman.com/index.shtml.