A Fix and a Note on John McPhee
Get rid of redundancies and an important component of John McPhee’s formation.
The Fix
The Sentence
The following sentence was taken from a blog post on the nature of personal priorities:
Core priorities are dynamic and can change over time, but I think that you can’t really have more than 3 core foci at a given time.
By way of example, this writer offered three core priorities in 2017: work, travel, relationship.
Feedback
Let’s focus on the first part of this sentence: Core priorities are dynamic and can change over time.
What does the writer mean that core priorities are dynamic? We think it means that whatever set of core priorities the writer has, they can change. In fact, the writer assesses her 2018 core priorities to be work, learning to code, and building side projects. In 2017, a relationship was important but in 2018 it wasn’t.
It seems to us that “dynamic” means the same thing as “can change over time.” Consequently, we’d get rid of one of these. For example, you could write “Core priorities can change over time” and there would be no loss in meaning.
Now let’s consider the second part of the sentence: but I think that you can’t really have more than 3 core foci at a given time.
The writer feels that having more than three core priorities is not advisable and we have no basis to question the claim. But we do have some suggestions for the wording. Have a look at the bolded words. The sentence can go with the first bolded word. When you proofread your work, we advise that you look at every instance of “that” to see which ones you can get rid of. In our experience we use a lot more “that”s than we need.
Note the second bolded word. The writer has substituted “focus” for “priority”. In our view, “foci” sounds clumsy here. We’d rewrite the sentence with “priorities”.
With these changes, the complete sentence can be rewritten:
Core priorities can change over time, but I think you can’t really have more than 3 core priorities at a given time.
Or better still,
Core priorities can change over time, but I don’t think you can have more than 3 of them at once.
Odds and Ends
John McPhee and Olive McKee
John McPhee is a Pulitzer Prize winning staff writer for The New Yorker and a professor of journalism at Princeton. He is generally associated with the beginnings of the genre “creative nonfiction.”
In his book “Draft No. 4,” he describes a key period in his education and development as a writer:
In my first three years at Princeton High School, in the late nineteen-forties, my English teacher was Olive McKee, whose self-chosen ratio of writing assignments to reading assignments seems extraordinary in retrospect and certainly differed from the syllabus of the guy who taught us in senior year. Mrs. McKee made us do three pieces of writing a week. Not every single week. Some weeks had Thanksgiving in them. But we wrote three pieces a week most weeks for three years. We could write anything we wanted to, but each composition had to be accompanied by a structural outline, which she told us to do first. It could be anything from Roman numerals I, II, III to a looping doodle with guiding arrows and stick figures. The idea was to build some form of blueprint before working it out in sentences and paragraphs. (p. 18)
One way to learn how to write is to practise. Mrs. McKee certainly gave her students lots of practise. No doubt, she edited each submission in detail. There may be Mrs. McKee’s still teaching but we seriously doubt it. A teacher today would be unlikely to have his/her students writing that much each week. Note that McPhee doesn’t remember the name of the guy who taught him in senior year. Mrs. McKee made an impression.
What is the lesson for Sentence Logic readers who are developing their writing ability? Well, it’s to find a good editor, write a lot, plan every piece you write, and ask your editor to critique every piece you write. You can become an expert writer if you work at it and get the right help.