A Fix and a Brief Glimpse of Dennard Dayle
Another fix and an introduction to writer Dennard Dayle.
The Fix
The Passage
We found the following passage at the beginning of a section of a blogpost entitled “The Power of Writing”:
Almost exactly one year ago, I decided to launch my blog. The impetus at the time was simply to distill my thoughts and have a medium to share them.
Let’s see what we can do with it.
Feedback
We’ve written before about not detracting from the essence of a sentence’s meaning. In the first sentence of the passage, the main idea is that the writer decided to start a blog a year ago. It seems to us that the exact start timing is not that important. So why not write
I decided to launch my blog a year ago.
Even better, why not
I launched my blog a year ago.
Here is the second sentence with a few words bolded:
The impetus at the time was simply to distill my thoughts and have a medium to share them.
It seems to us that all of these bolded words could be removed without changing the sentence’s meaning:
The impetus was to distill my thoughts and share them.
There is no question that writing is a way to clarify your thinking. William Faulkner said “I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.” But we’re not sure a writer needs to point this out. For the subject sentence, why not write
The impetus was to share my thoughts.
But isn’t it true that every blogger has this purpose? Consequently, the writer could have written “I launched my blog a year ago” and then simply carried on.
Odds and Ends
Dennard Dayle
Sentence Logic readers who like brief comedic writing pieces may have come upon some of the work of Dennard Dayle, a New York writer who offers this vita on his website (https://www.seemoreevil.com/who/):
Dennard Dayle is a New York-based superpredator, specializing in writing, comedy, and illegal pranks. He studied “liking books” at Princeton and Columbia, where he spoke a great deal and learned very little. Now he teaches at Columbia for a MetroCard. He started See More Evil and co-hosts the anime podcast Weeaboo Hell. His debut book Everything Abridged comes out in Spring 2022 through The Overlook Press.
Dayle is black, has an undergrad degree from Princeton, and an MFA from Columbia. A number of his short pieces have appeared in The New Yorker and here we give a glimpse of his latest “A Time Line of My Arrest” (The New Yorker, June 22, 2022, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/27/a-time-line-of-my-arrest). In it, he describes has experience being arrested for “putting stickers on lampposts.” He’s taken to a police station and put in a cell whose occupants are all black: “It’s the most diverse cell I’ve ever seen. American Black, African Black, Caribbean Black, indeterminate Black—the works.”
Among the characters he gets to know are Cellmates A, B, and C. At roughly 8:25 pm, Cellmate B directs a plea of leniency to his jailers on behalf of his cellmates: “Don’t worry, we’re good niggas. A little time here, a little time in booking, and we’ll be fine. No bad niggas in here. We haven’t hurt anyone.”
The protagonist is released shortly after 11 pm and makes a beeline for a diner where “I inhale two plates of heart disease.”
The piece is full of these one-liners and well worth the read. We’ve ordered his new book Everything Abridged.