The Mechanic & the Muse

Say it again, Sam.

So I’m driving to work the other day and a news report about the death of famed  50’s crooner and songwriter Frankie Laine  comes on the radio.

A phrase jumps out. “In a prepared statement, the family said... .”

“Prepared statement?

What’s the converse: an ”unprepared“ statement.

My colleague, style watchdog Scott Libin, wondered if an unprepared statement requires that ”the words would appear in random order.“

There seems no doubt: prepared statement is redundant. Limit it to ”statement.“ You lose none of the meaning and trim your story by a word.

Stay alert for redundancies in your prose, omitting those speed bumps that distract a listener/viewer/reader.

p.s.I initially described Scott Libin as ”ever-vigilant language watchdog.“ But watchdogs, by their very nature, are expected to be ever-vigilant, as opposed to asleep at the switch. Out went ”ever-vigilant,“ The meaning’s preserved while the story is a two-word hybrid shorter.

You can listen to samples from Laine's "Greatest Hits" album on this amazon.com page.

Three in two rows

The opening paragraph of Kenneth Cain's GQ portrait of Joe Lieberman's failed Senatorial primary race against Ned Lamott provides a sweet example of the rule of three and the power of parallelism. Although these rhetorical devices are ably explained on Michael Harvey's crystal-clear "Nuts and Bolts of College Writing," site, magazine writer Cain's use demonstrates their value to professional writers who rely on such rhetorical strategies with every sentence they craft. 

"Outsiders tend to think of Connecticut as leafy, white, and wealthy, but its three biggest cities—Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport—are hardscrabble, black, and poor."

It may seem an obvious stylistic and structural choice, but how often do we make one like it?