Repetitive, repetitious problems of repetition

he's also a moron.

as for the repitition here seeming to be many writers make the same mistakes over and over no matter how often you correct them, well, it's no different than athletics. some people are 'coachable,' other just cannot be helped and/or do not car enough to be helped.

it's like the previous thread regarding the abuse of quotes. i think we all agree that being disciplined, seletive is key. we're not transcribers. a football writer i used to work with was painfully slow on deadline, largely 'cause he wasted soooo much time transcribing. and he'd just run two-graph quotes incessantly, often letting the 'nut part' of the quote to be buried. no matter how often i'd take him aside the next day and point out his abuse, and no matter how many times he'd agree and acknowledge how the competing papers used the same quotes correctly, he just couldn't stop it or change his process.


so i took to trimming the quotes myself, when there was enough time to do so, always to raves from him: 'man, you're making me look like i can write!'


at least he appreciated it. but it's unreal how many pros on this level are simply awful writers.

 

Considering there's a whole thread devoted to how out-of-touch you are then, I'm not going to revisit that argument here. You might as well just read it.

 

Considering there's a difference between what I said and what they did, I don't think I'm out of touch at all. I read that thread when it happened. I am not advocating for writing like an SID. Just writing about the team you actually cover. One team's great comeback is another's blown lead. If I'm covering the team that blew the lead, aspects of that will probably get placed higher in the story.

But if you can't see that, oh well.

Edit: Looking back, I guess I veered off with the phrase, "Actual story." I've always thought any game has two actual stories. One side won, the other lost. Now there are obviously exceptions, but I think it's important to cover a game in the way that serves your readers.

 

The worst was a young reporter whom I worked with several years ago. Covered a local high school basketball team, which included a player named Kevin Bird. Everytime he mentioned Bird in a story, it was ALWAYS "Kevin Bird, no relation to Hall of Famer Larry Bird, .... " The first couple of times it struck me as funny, especially since the reporter was fresh out of college and generally a nice kid.

By the fifth time, I explained to him that the dependent clause really wasn't necessary because we lived nowhere near Indiana and Kevin Bird was about 5-foot-10, brunette, and white, not all that great a player, and that, well, Bird was actually a fairly common surname. By the 10th time, it got to be "Steven, if I have to edit this crap out one more time, I'm going to take this pica pole (old timers will remember what a pica pole is) and shove it so far up your ass that it might just come out the other side."

He finally got the point!