Let us start by saying that we dearly love Peter Gammons. His insight into, and insider knowledge of, the game of baseball is second to none, and we suspect that he knows about upcoming trades before the participating GMs do. You've heard this all before. Because he's won awards, everybody loves him, and he was really sick last year, he's basically off-limits to any blogger or critic who desires to say negative things about sports journalists.
So why did we create this blog? Well, like anybody else who writes a blog, we think that what we have to say is important, and in some way unique. (Given the number of blogs that exist, we doubt that this is always, or even usually, true, but that's a whole other post.) The bottom line is, both Foist and I have been reading Gammons' blog entries and, prior to that, his columns, for some time now. Every time he writes anything, we have a conversation about how utterly incomprehensible the majority of his sentences are, sentences supposedly written in English.
Those of you with only a passing knowledge of English grammar and syntax (which, sadly, make up the vast majority of Americans) are right now staring at the screen, wondering where these assholes get off taking shots one of the most respected journalists of the past 50 years. Those of you who can distinguish between participial phrases and prepositional phrases and haven't been turning a blind eye to everything Gammons-related are probably nodding your heads, waiting and waiting for this blog to come along.
Before we go any further, allow us to offer to those non-believers among you some samplings of the works we will be skewering:
10/24: On the one hand, there is Troy Tulowitzki, built like Cal Ripken or even a young Troy Glaus, 6-foot-3, with 23-home run power, a gun for an arm and underestimated athleticism that got him 130 more chances than any other shortstop in baseball -- such athleticism that two teams that do defensive data claim the difference between Tulowitzki and the second-best defensive shortstop this season was greater than the difference between No. 2 and No. 9.You might accuse us of combing two, three, maybe four sentences into one, but we can assure you that this is a direct quote, and it's supposed to be one sentence. If I had attempted to submit this sentence in my term paper for Mr. Kaufman in eleventh grade, he would have drawn a big X over the entire thing and written "Wommy," which, when translated from his awful handwriting into actual English, would mean "Wordy". Additionally, the use of a dash to combine these sentences is a classic cop-out. The dash is saying to the world, "I'm here because Gammons doesn't know how to use a semicolon, transitional words, or dependent clauses."
Again, we're not mocking the content of Gammons' writing; he's making a decent point, if not an earth-shattering one. Instead, to borrow a classic Gammons construction, "it is the writing that is what is bothering us." (Note: this construction is bad.) In the future, we'll post quotes from various guides to essay writing, so that those of you who don't understand what makes the writing so terrible can enjoy the biting criticism.
What's that, you say? You want another example? Let's reach into the archives a bit, shall we?
10/3: The Mets "blew" a seven-game lead to a team that rode shotgun down the avalanche in September, a team from whom the Mets can look at and learn from.Wow. All kinds of stuff to address here. Let's run down the list, shall we?
1. The Mets didn't "blow" the lead. They blew the lead. Maybe blew the lead. But why use quotes? Did they not actually blow it? Was he quoting somebody who only said the word "blew"? How did he know this somebody wasn't actually saying "blue"?
2. How do you ride shotgun down an avalanche? That is one of the worst mixed metaphors I've ever read. Gammons, by the way, mixes metaphors quite routinely. Pretty funny stuff.
3. This last clause is bad on so many levels. Let's reprint it.
...a team from whom the Mets can look at and learn from.
a. "From whom" should be "from which", since he's talking about a team. A team is comprised of people, but it is not in itself a person. Again, writing 101. The average Joe may not be aware of the distinction, but you'll have to pardon me for holding the Great Peter Gammons to a higher standard.
b. When I first saw this, I thought to myself, "Gammons should really know better than to end his sentence in a preposition." Then I saw that he actually put the preposition in the right place in addition to dangling it redundantly at the end of the sentence. It was like he thought that the first usage of "from" just didn't look right.* So he figured, oh, hell, I'll just throw it in there again. Couldn't hurt, right? After all, I'm the mighty Peter Gammons!
*c. It's possible that Gammons thought that the first "from" was wrong because it actually is wrong. Look again. "A team from whom the Mets can look at..." This clause actually becomes even worse when you delete the last three words, including the dangling preposition! Gammons is arguing that the Mets can "look at from" this other team, which for whatever reason he waits until the second sentence to name. Good God.
More to come.
1 comment:
One point I left out was, where is ESPN during all of this? ESPN generally delivers well-written columns; even edgy columnists like Bill Simmons stick to standard, correct English. In fact, I can't think of a single other ESPN columnist who ever makes my head spin the way Gammons routinely does. (I wouldn't mind if Jayson Stark's sentences occasionally broke the seven-word mark, but that's more a stylistic choice than a shortcoming.) Gammons, most likely due to a combination of awe, longevity, and general coolness, seems to have a free pass to write however he likes, and no silly copy editor can tell him how to write!
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