We all make errors when we write – even the pros who report the news. Play copy editor and decide how you’d refine these passages from the past week.
1. The middle-of-the-road shopper, neither low-end nor high-end, who in recent years has become elusive for shopping malls – is the reason why Macy’s, Sears and JCPenney are shutting stores.
2. Both candidates have offices right down the street from each other.
3. So Lue’s answer to this problem is for Irving and Love to care more? His plan is most assuredly more deeper and nuanced than that.
Refinements
1. The middle-of-the-road shopper, neither low-end nor high-end, who in recent years has become elusive for shopping malls – is the reason why Macy’s, Sears and JCPenney are shutting stores.
The easy improvement here – especially if your antennae have been sharpened by previous blog mentions of redundancies involving the words “reason,” “because,” and “why” – is deleting the superfluous “why” in “reason why.”
But also notice the perfect use of hyphens and a stumble on the en dash. En dashes (and em dashes) employed in this way come in pairs, unless the sentence ends where the second dash would appear. (Just as parentheses come in pairs.) So we need an en dash before “who” to set up the concluding en dash after “malls.” Now that section is set off correctly, creating smooth navigation for the reader: The middle-of-the-road shopper, neither low-end nor high-end – who in recent years has become elusive for shopping malls – is the reason Macy’s, Sears and JCPenney are shutting stores.
2. Both candidates have offices right down the street from each other.
So if my office is right down the street from yours, I guess yours is right down the street from mine. Duh. Therefore, starting the sentence with “Both” is needless. Simply writing “The candidates” is the way to go: The candidates have offices right down the street from each other.
3. So Lue’s answer to this problem is for Irving and Love to care more? His plan is most assuredly more deeper and nuanced than that.
The easy revision here, of course, is taking care of the clumsy “more deeper and nuanced.” Let’s make that “deeper and more nuanced.”
But again (picky, picky!) I have a second improvement in mind. Linking “answer” and “is for” doesn’t seem like the smoothest match. We can get rid of the questionable “for” by changing “to care” to “caring”: So Lue’s answer to this problem is Irving and Love caring more? His plan is most assuredly deeper and more nuanced than that.
In addition to presenting workshops on writing in the workplace, Norm 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.