bigfan wrote:
You may not agree with what he wrote, with what he says, but he is a very good writer and thus can spin some things in a bit of an eloquent way, making it just sound better.
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Which makes him nothing more than a good mechanic or technician. Any English professor at any junior college across the country can put two grammatically correct sentences together to form a paragraph.
The columnist should be looking for the added feature of writing about subject matter that is always relevant and make it timeless. It is hard to hold anyone up to Royko's standard, but use him as an example. People write books twenty years later about his works regarding mundane topics.
There is not a single Jay article that I find relevant beyond the day it is penned. That is why I stopped reading. Furthermore, he himself will most likely contradict the article within a week. If he doesn't believe what he is writing, why should I invest any time digesting it?
Telander has become painfully boring in his Sun Times years. However, at least he strives to be a great columnist. Jay tries for nothing more than to be a well structured blogger.
If there is one thing I would encourage Dan Mc Neil in his writing it would be to stop attempting to be mechanically perfect. Instead look for more macro type topics to write about and present the story in a way that makes the reader think long after he has left the paper in stall #2 (and no, I am not aparicio).