You're a crappy writer

Anthony Kennedy, the swing justice whose vote is so crucial that the courtroom became absolutely silent each time he opened his mouth, doesn’t like this case, Hollingsworth v. Perry, any more, if he ever did.

--Emily Bazelon, Slate

This is the second sentence and the first wasn't a smooth ride either. I read this one several times. Sure, this bit--"any more, if he ever did"--is awkward but it also doesn't make any sense. How would anyone know if a Supreme Court justice "liked" a case yet to be decided? Well, apparently it can be inferred from the questions he asked during yesterday's arguments  but Bazelon doesn't know enough to tell us that first.

But "any more" suggests--Oh, I don't t know--that he told someone at a cocktail party that he liked Hollingsworth. But then there's "if he ever did." No one every assumed he did. It's just stupid. As though she didn't even glance at the copy after she finished it.

I didn't continue all the way through this article. But I can't help but notice that Emily Bazelon has recently written a book on bullying (of children, I suppose) because it's been reviewed by several reputable pubs.  Surely, anyone that has come across her writing on Slate would know enough to avoid a book by her. As has sometimes been pointed out by Slate commenters, she is well connected as the granddaughter of a famous judge, David Bazelon, so perhaps that explains the extensive coverage. She belongs to the affluent Mommy blogger school when she isn't filling in for Slate's other Supreme Court writer, so perhaps she isn't paid.

Somewhere in Stoker's gorgeous heap of near-absurd imagery, jaw-dropping transitions, domestic melodrama, and suggestive narrative half-threads is a metaphor for the career of its South Korean director Park Chan-wook.

At least he's consistent. Sure, that lede sentence is gangly, with phrases that made one squint twice ("near-absurd"? "suggestive ... half-threads"?), but it seemed on the way to being accurate in both the grammar and punctuation departments.

But then we come to this: "the career of its South Korean director Park Chan-wook." Comma after "director" or omit "its". Two easy choices; as usual, Juzwiak makes the wrong choice.

  Let's give him another chance. Can he--will he--get through the second sentence unscathed?

  In staggers, loops and layers, Stoker's story follows the passage into adulthood of India Stoker (gangled by Mia Wasikowska, whose obsessive performance warrants obsession) while wondering, in an elliptical and inconclusive sort of way, if she is innately evil.

  God in heaven, I can't bear to attempt to untangle this mess. Gangled? The story is wondering? Both elliptical and inconclusive? Well, sort of.

The finest bloggers, meaning the finest writers who happen to write primarily online, got good, like every other writer, by reading, and writing. These things—particularly the writing part—can be accomplished for free, without ever paying a penny to Duke or any other university, and without filling out an application form to an academic program. 

I agree with the thrust of this Gawker post but is it so difficult to demonstrate? A very quickie fix:

Like every other fine writer, the finest bloggers--that is, the finest writers that happen to write primarily online--got there by reading and writing. These things, particularly the writing part, can be achieved at very little monetary cost and without ever paying a penny to Duke or any other university. 

When I want to explain exactly what shade (as in "throwing shade") is, I refer back to the expert words of Dorian Corey in Jennie Livingston's Paris Is Burning: "Shade is, ‘I don't tell you you're ugly, but I don't have to tell you because you know you're ugly.' And that's shade."

That's the effing  lede. How can it get worse? Apparently, it does. Some commenters read through the whole thing (always a very long thing with this idiot writer) and say they still don't know the meaning of "shade" or what "Paris is Burning" is or was. It may be a movie but it isn't a WW2 doc, though. There is no reason to explain because every post is written for a semi-hip gay male New York who is passionate about pop culture and recaps of last night's reality TV show.

I'll make a lede stab, though: "To 'throw shade' upon someone is to make particularly biting kind of passive-aggressive remark. It's a backhanded compliment with an extra twist to the knife. A character in an early 1990s documentary about drag queens put it like this ..."

As it typically happens with popularity, there has been a backlash in response by those who claim that the term "throwing shade" has become a blanket term for bitchiness. 

The fact is, Weight Watchers continues to fail the vast majority of people because dieting doesn't work. This is a problem, especially when you consider the fact that soon our government might soon be pointing people in their direction for health care:

Now, from a New York Times interview with her mom friends in the Charlotte, N.C. neighborhood where she lives with her husband and two sons we get the opposite Paula Broadwell: radiologist’s wife, serves dinner by candlelight, walks her boys to the bus stop every morning, wears a costume while handing out candy at Halloween.

... Broadwell as a simpering seductress who flashed her bare arms and her 6 minute mile legs at the quivering older man.

Broadwell, who herself has a military background, made a number of media appearances earlier this year while promoting the release of her book.

-- Josh Vorhees, Slate

James Wood wishes he was Keith Moon, but thank goodness he’s not.

This was the puffing of a now frequently bared chest or maybe autofellatio from a woman who had recently told Vanity Fair, "I think I have a dick in my brain."

                             --Rich Juzwiak

Second sentence of the thing and Juzwiak is already in deep do-do.

Frequently bared autofellatio? Puffing of autofellatio? A woman's autofellatio, at that. Also lost about what era the "now" refers to.

Next sentence:

The material she was talking about, which included a jazzy hip-hop ballad that used the "eating out" double entendre to make cunnilingus sound like fine dining and a song called "Why's It So Hard," in which the "it" was not a penis, didn't exactly require trained dogs to sniff out its multiple tiers. 

At least I think it's one sentence. I'm not inclined re-sniff it too many times. The dogs are just too busy today.

How about: "a ballad that equated cunnilingus with fine dining"?

 It's brilliant and clear, intense and hysterical and its moments of profundity are there for the consuming, should you be interested in that sort of thing.

Three sentences in with Gawker's turdiest writer and it can certainly be argued that this sentence doesn't contain a punctuation area. But customary displays of poor sentence structure, diction, punctuation, spelling and grammar go hand-and- hand with muddled thinking, of course. 

I halted at "moments of profundity are there for the consuming." Well, where else would be they be? It's a movie, after all. And now into the second thought: "moments of profundity"? Diction issues again.  Juzwiak probably intends "flashes of insight" or "authentic moments." This is a man with a very small vocabulary bag.

  And "should you be interested in that sort of thing" needs no further comment unless you're a very novice writer. OK: Is that bit really necessary? Does it aid the reader's understanding in any way? As I said before, Juzwiak that never appears to have reread or reconsidered a word, a sentence or a paragraph.

fabricate a fake sci-fi movie

But I repeat myself.

It is a near-perfect movie and a perfect piece of pop culture for 2012

Ditto.  Maybe there would be some improvement if he were given a very strict word count.

It is a political retelling of a political story that comes in an intensely political year. 

God help us. At least there's a theme to this piece of crap writing.

All it'll take you is about 20 minutes to ingest Argo's similarly accessible and entertaining source material.

Accessible and entertaining? Wait a minute, didn't Mendez write an entire book? Somehow, you can't imagine Juzwiak ever referring to a book. Or even reading one. He's passionate about pop culture.  Trash TV, B-movies, GIFs and the occasional online article constitute his sources of cultural literacy.

A higher-up (played by Philip Baker Hall): "You don't have a better bad option?" Jack O'Donnell (Bryan Cranston): "This is the best bad idea we have found so far."

Andrea Arnold's gorgeous and raw spin on Wuthering Heights opens in limited release and features a black Heathcliff (via Solomon Glave, who plays him as a teen and James Howson, who handles the grown-up portion of the film, which covers only about the first half of Emily Brontë's novel).

"... played by Solomon Glave as a teen and James Howson as an adult) who ... which ..."  

Hell, I give up. I don't know what to call this combo of who/which errors but it reminds me of some good advice I heard from a high school teacher: You can write just about anything better by avoiding parentheses.

That was the second sentence of what might be a review. I didn't read enough to tell. Here's Juzwiak's next sentence:

Meanwhile, Kenny Leon's adaptation of Steel Magnolias features the likes of Queen Latifah, Phylicia Rashād and a show-stealing Alfre Woodard among its entirely black principle cast. It airs Sunday on Lifetime.

A very principled cast, I'm sure. Wuthering Heights, the new movie, can be called an adaptation because the original was a novel. But the previous Steel Magnolias was just a movie, right? I don't care if I'm wrong; the reader shouldn't be expected run to Wikipedia. This is the kind of little note you drop in quickly: "a remake of the 19xx Southern chick-flick" or whatever. (I haven't seen it). Make that a made-for-TV remake, I guess.

It is interesting to see that Heathcliff was referred to as a Lascar in the novel. The director isn't quite accurate when she says Lascars were Indians. Many of these seamen were from the subcontinent but, as the Wikipedia entry notes, they were all sorts of riff-raff from the Middle East, Yemen. Which I learned from reading Amitav Ghosh's terrific historical novel, Sea of Poppies. Ghosh is still thinking of Lascars. At any rate, great to see that the character is being depicted authentically and that people might learn about an entire community and their mixed children were living in Britain for several hundred years.

On Heathcliff's otherness, which helps flesh out the doomed nature of his mutual love with Catherine ...

Yeah. Juzwiak doesn't know what "mutual" means. How about otherness heightening/deepening/intensifying?

The promo press for Magnolias handles the alteration less directly, if at all, typically treating Magnolias as just another remake. 

Too many messes to think about but: is the typical activity that of the promo press? Of the TV channel? Something else? And does promo press ever treat anything "as just another remake"? Aren't these things always treated as the TV event of the year? Until the next one.

Jersey Shore returned for its sixth and final season last night, and ugh, Jersey Shore is on TV again. 

That's the first sentence, the lede, of a relatively short (for Juzwiak) Gawker blog post: already two basic punctuation errors. Correct: no comma after "night" but commas setting off "ugh."  Ugh. That second error especially astounds me. It's an aside; the rule is pretty straightforward, right?

 I haven't kept up regularly since three quarters of the way through Season 2, but it seems like they're [who?] still fighting about the same stuff they were fighting about two seasons ago, if last night's flashback reel was an indication.

Second sentence: All right, "three-quarters" may be a mere missing hyphen error but the comma before "but" is stupid. Then there's no introduction to who "they're/they" are.

Juzwiak is a terrible writer--self-indulgent, windy, never a thought in his head.  He's like a kid in junior high who throws the same few adjectives around--Gross! Awesome!--but can't yet   articulate any reasons why those adjectives come to mind. Of course, he doesn't yet have the vocabulary to express nuanced observations either. Another junior high trait: Juzwiak never seems to have reread a sentence or paragraph after he's written it. He's never asked himself, "Is there a better way to write this sentence? Maybe I could cut a word, paragraph, a page?"

I try not to intentionally read anything by him. He often writes way too long so,  when I do, I usually don't finish. I didn't read this whole post. But I read enough to note another reason he's such a crappy writer: he doesn't think about who the Gawker readers might be: Men, women, not gay, New Yorkers, non-New Yorkers, people that never watch crap TV. Like many unpaid bloggers, he's probably been writing for years for his friends and, damn it, he's not going to attempt to put anything into context. It doesn't even occur to him.

He not only assumes all his Gawker readers are familiar with this TV show; he assumes they saw this very episode the previous night. I guess he somehow got this far doing TV recaps of the and then this and then this and then this happened strain. He is so absorbed in watching crap TV, he has never tried to emulate any of the real TV critics, such as Troy Patterson and Tom Shales, that can actually critique a program, convey its essence and make the review a piece of entertainment as well. I rarely watch TV but Patterson is one of the few reasons I bother dropping into Slate nowadays. 

A final blast from his "Jersey Shore" recap:

One was convinced the word was mostly applied to men, and the other said it was used far more in reference to women (the rationale was: men wear scumbags and are scumbags; women use douchebags and are douchebags). It was this giant existential crisis and they had no idea.

"We touched down after a nine-hour flight to Hong Kong, a round of meetings were held and, I believe, I passed out"

That's the deck, possibly the lede sentence, of the September 21 column by Tyler Brûlé*  in the Financial Times. I couldn't read any more because, first, I was trying to figure out how many things were wrong with that sentence--which of course should be more than one sentence.

There are three clauses in a row and the second one doesn't follow the structure of the first. Then in the final one, we return to first person, though it's first person singular and the attempt at a sentence starts with first person plural. Why am I spending time rewriting it in my head to make sense? It should start with something like, "Touching down in Hong Kong after a nine-hour flight, we proceeded to xxx hours of meetings ..."

Second, I didn't even glance at the article because looking down the list of his most recent column titles and their decks led to further head spinning and recasting

September 14 column:

"I am advised to stay put in Bangkok and cancel all travel plans because of a pulled muscle, but I fly to Brisbane anyway"

Most obviously, no comma before a conjunction. Next, this is a sentence that begs for the active voice: Lead with pulled muscle. Then there's the redundancy: If you are told to cancel further travel plans, that would mean staying in Bangkok. Always ask yourself, "Can I say this more concisely?" Does this guy take a second look at anything he writes? He must have plenty of time waiting around airports and flying for the sake of flying.

September 7 column: "a plan ... where passengers could connect ..."? How can passengers connect in a plan? If you can make it through the end of the sentence, you hit something about "infrastructure works for residents." Again, a parallelism problem--and in such a brief stretch of sentence. First there's "passengers" and in the next breath, "residents": both of these are people! Put them in the same part of the sentence. Don't contrast "passengers" with "infrastructure."

You can also always count on the burnt one for the awesomely banal, as his August 17 column advises:

Differentiate - or die

"Magazines should focus on what their most loyal customers are looking for – something new to read"

  Sure, the August 31 column's subject was also banal:

"Properties with access to great running routes could make more of their perfect locations in their marketing material"

I also swear I have read this column by Brûlé before. I only run across a column by him about once a year. Perhaps once every two years. But he has been writing this FT column, on the same narrow spectrum of subjects, for many years. Airports, hotels, the uniforms of flight attendants. He apparently flies around the globe at least once a month, stopping in no city for more than a few days. The sole purpose of the exercise is to keep report on the stuff you try to forget about business travel.

However,the main problem with that sentence is the choice of "could." A diction problem. He means "should." Now that I look again, "Properties with access to great running routes" is also irritating. There has to be a briefer, punchier way to say that. "Properties" or "hotels"?  Do properties have "marketing material"? If so, properties plural probably have plural materials.

The subject of the August 10 installment, besides being banal, is just stupid:

"The Japanese have a functional ensemble that is uniquely their own"

Have you ever worn one, Brûle? Ever asked Japanese women why they don't wear a kimono unless compelled by ceremony of whatever? Kimono are very uncomfortable. You have a little packet on your back. You worry about the front falling open. You're supposed to wear the geta sandals with a kimono, which promote shuffling. Forget running, you can't even stride properly. Now a crisp cotton yukata at a bath or a hotel ... that's functional and comfy. But surely he couldn't have confused the two?

Just one more, from July 13, re how desperate this man is for topics:

"I think there should be a new global standard for grading travel experiences. Changi airport gets full marks."

There's not much people can say about Singapore, so the airport gets mentioned a lot. Plus, year after year, in passenger or pilot surveys or whatever, Changi pops up a lot.