"Base-running is a really important skill for a player to have," Joe Lean, coach of the Terryville Tigers, said.
Marcus Markham, coach of the PS148 Panthers, agreed: "Every player needs to train hard for base-running."
A sentence that is sandwiched between two quotations and that says only that one person "agreed" shows that the writer was just pasting quotations together. It tells us that the writer herself didn't have any more solid information to share with readers. Or that she's not experienced enough to understand that you don't have to include every good quotation. She doesn't get that redundancy wastes the reader's time. And she's still too timid to say anything in a story that isn't clearly attributed to someone else.
I suppose there are some cases where this structure would be justified. But it's such a hallmark of inexperienced writers that it should only be used as a last resort.
What's worse is that, often, the second quotation is followed by solid and interesting facts.
Marcus Markham, coach of the PS148 Panthers, agreed: "Every trainer needs to train hard for base running." In fact, Markham is so convinced of this that he makes his players report to the field three times a day to run for five minutes.
All the info before "he makes his players report" is wasted ink. If the writer would have gotten straight to that interesting bit of info, the writing would be more like the stuff you see in top-quality publications.
Posts
2 comments:
I like these writing tips! Nice example and explanation. I'm curious, in this case, did you revise the sentence or suggest a rewrite?
I'm sorry it took so long to get your comment posted. I've actually been busy for a few months and I'm so not used to it.
To answer your question, I rewrote the passage. I went straight from the first quote into some solid info from a few sentences later. Like:
"Base-running is a really important skill for a player to have," Joe Lean, coach of the Terryville Tigers, said.
Marcus Markham, coach of the PS148 Panthers, makes his players report to the field three times a day to run for five minutes. "Every player needs to train hard for base-running," Markham said.
The problem was that the writer thought that having two sources affirming each other was significant. And, if you're thinking only of the writer, I suppose that's true. It reaffirms that the story premise is valid.
But to the reader, I think that facts and actions are more important than seeing that two guys will voice the same opinion.
Stepping out of one's own little private writer mind and remembering the reader really does result in better writing.
Post a Comment