The Fix
The Passage
This is the byline from the blogpost we looked at entitled “Finding Top Talent: Stop Looking Inside a Box for People Thinking Outside of One”:
When you're looking for innovative and action-driven talent, why not open your doors up to people that have already pioneered their own lives?
[The bolding is ours.]
We like this sentence but it needs revision.
Feedback
Lt’s have a look at the bolded words.
We don’t think you need the “and” between “innovative” and “action-driven.”
When you open doors, you open them up. Let’s get rid of “up”.
Should it be “people that have already pioneered” or “people who have already pioneered”? We like the latter.
When people “pioneer their own lives” they also “pioneer their lives.” Let’s get rid of the word “own.”
These changes give this revision:
When you're looking for innovative, action-driven talent, why not open your doors to people who have already pioneered their lives?
We could go further with this.
“open your doors to” is a cliché. Let’s get rid of it:
When you're looking for innovative, action-driven talent, why not people who have already pioneered their lives?
Is “already” required? We don’t think so. The past tense of the verb makes “already” redundant. So we would rewrite:
When you're looking for innovative, action-driven talent, why not people who have pioneered their lives?
We could have a go at what it means for folks to “pioneer their lives.” That seems like an interesting idea if it means what we think it does. But enough already.
Odds and Ends
In the next few posts, we’re going to look at the reasons some of our students have trouble writing a sentence. We’ll start with a few posts on the ideas of Lewis Lapham.
Lewis Lapham
Lewis Lapham is an American public intellectual, a former editor of Harper’s, and editor of the eponymous Lapham’s Quarterly. Here is a paragraph from an essay he wrote on education (“Playing with Fire,” Lapham’s Quarterly, 1(4), 2008).
The tide of mediocrity flows into the classroom from the ocean that is the society at large, and if many of our public schools resemble penal institutions, the students herded into overcrowded classrooms where they major in the art of boredom and the science of diminished expectations, how better to accustom them to the design specs of a society geared to the blind and insatiable consumption of mediocrity in all its political declensions and commercial conjugations—cf. the Bush Administration’s geopolitical theory at work in Iraq, the quality of the nation’s airline and fast-food service, corporate executives paid $20 million a year for performing the miracle of an $18 billion write-down. Why would any politician in his or her right mind wish to confront an informed citizenry capable of breaking down the campaign speeches into their subsets of supporting lies? Burden the economy with too many customers able to decipher the hospital bills, or see around the corners of the four-color advertising, and the consequences would be terrible to behold. Not even the Federal Reserve Bank could slow down the domino effect likely to shuffle through the entire inventory of the American dream. If much of what now passes for American education deadens the desire for learning (in both the downmarket public schools and the high-end private universities), so does much of what passes for entertainment in the nation’s film and television media. The United States now spends a good part of its fortune on narcotics—for pornography and alcohol as well as for drugs both illicit and prescribed. As a business proposition the war against the American intellect guarantees a more reliable rate of return than the War on Terror.
As Lapham suggests here, when we consider the reasons why our educational institutions don’t work very well, we don’t have to look much further than our well-heeled citizenry and government. For the lower levels of society, a good education is the answer but try to tell them that. Is there a War on the Canadian Intellect? Absolutely, but we’d like to hear what SL readers have to say.
Word of the Day
Here is another paragraph from Lapham’s essay “Playing with Fire”:
Beyond anything else they could imagine the ancient Greeks admired what Sophocles called the glittering play of “wind-swift thought.” Pericles in his funeral oration boasted not of the weapons or the works of art collected in the city, although these were many and beautiful, but of the character of the Athenian citizen—self-reliant, resourceful, public-spirited, marked by “refinement without extravagance and knowledge without effeminacy.”
What caught our attention was the last word—“effeminacy.” Admittedly, there is quite a distance between the Greek Pericles spoke and the English we speak today. But let’s suppose this translator knew what he or she was doing when they chose the word “effeminacy.” The Merriam Webster has two definitions for effeminate. The first is “having feminine qualities untypical of a man / not manly in appearance or manner.” This is the gender-based definition of the word. The second definition is “marked by an unbecoming delicacy or overrefinement” and we think this is the definition that translator had in mind. Knowledgeable Athenians were not judged to be nerds.