I think the effort was much stronger than the last few I read (I didn't read last week's), and worthy of a week's worth of effort. However, Mac has a tendency to write like someone would talk, falling back on hoary colloquialisms. Case in point:
Quote:
That's pretzel logic personified. Local gin mills, restaurants and apparel outlets open their doors there because of the circuslike atmosphere. Businesses thrive on the flurry of activity.
Or:
Quote:
whole new can of unwanted worms
There's a few others as well. I don't mean to criticize too much, because the effort was pretty strong on the whole and a definite improvement. A wise man once gave some simple rules for writing (to which I admit to being an imperfect follower):
Quote:
1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Mac is good about two, four, and five, OK at six, and needs work on one and three. It seems like his main trick when he gets stuck is to pile a few cliches on top of one another, thereby creating a sort of super-cliche. It works in radio, because you tend to loose track of such things as you're listening, and mixed or exaggerated metahphors are a common verbal tic. When you're reading a passage with those things, they stick out much more clearly.
As I said the effort was better, I feel obliged to give the positives as well:
The topic was much less fleeting. A daily columnist, or someone who churns out five a week or however often they force Telander to pretend to work these days, can afford to be ephemeral. Bad article that'll be dated in a day? Who cares, you've got another shot tomorrow. If you're writing an article every day, I want your opinion on what happened last night, or what will happen tomorrow.
If you're writing once a week, I expect something more. Not every effort is going to be Pulitzer-worthy, and readers understand that. Still, I expect something... broader. "Why is John Paxson so joyless?" doesn't qualify. Bringing out the internal contradictions of Chicago's major sports neighborhood comes much closer.
I think that Greg Couch (I think that's his name) is pretty good about that, although he's also a joyless scold that finds misery and dispair in every topic he touches upon. He'll dig deeper for a topic than, say, Telander, and his articles are bit less hemmed to the particular day he writes them. I don't much like Couch, but I think he is better than most in that regard.
I guess I don't have more specific advise than that, and I'm sure you don't particularly care if I do.
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