A Fix and a Paragraph from The New Yorker
Another fix and a funny paragraph from The New Yorker.
The Fix
The Sentence
We found the following sentence in a blogpost where the writer is assessing what she accomplished over the past year:
However, I have to be honest and say that sometimes I see people working on things that they’re either a) not passionate about or b) not super proud of, but they’re killing it.
The first sentence of this post is “I’ve come to appreciate that each year passes in a unique way.”
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Below, we've indicated some words we think are unnecessary.
However, I have to be honest and say that sometimes I see people working on things that they’re either a) not passionate about or b) not super proud of, but they’re killing it.
The sentence becomes
However, I sometimes see people working on things that they’re either not passionate about or not super proud of, but they’re killing it.
We could probably do some more with this sentence but we’ll leave it there.
Odds and Ends
A Paragraph from The New Yorker
From time to time, The New Yorker will publish funny material in its Shouts and Murmurs section. A good example is the recent piece by comedian Mike O’Brien titled “Missed Connections, 1/7/21” (June 27, 2022). It’s a series of sketches about how those involved in the Capital Riot of Jan 6, 2021 thought they had made a brief eye-to-eye “romantic connection” with another present that day and are trying to reconnect with that person. Here is the last one:
You were the only girl I saw all day. I was told that this would be a place to meet ladies, but that was certainly not the case, ha. You were wearing two camouflage jackets. One on top of the other, ha. We made eye contact while you were taking a dump in the rotunda. Couldn’t tell if you were smiling or straining, but I hope smiling! ’Cause I thought you were cute. Let me know which it was. Would like to go for coffee if was smiling.
In his book Louder Than Words, cognitive scientist Benjamin Bergen explores how we make sense of what we read. Very often we conjure a mental image whose detail goes well beyond the words on the page. In our case, we see a female—possibly constipated—dropping trow to lay cable on the Rotunda floor. Not really the stuff of romance in our books. And it does present complications. If these two ever got together and had kids, how would they answer questions like “Hey Dad [Mom], how’d you meet Mom [Dad]?”