The first paragraph contains a period where a comma should be. Otherwise, good job! Very persuasively done... (Thanks to Covert History.)Top Stories - AP
Coulter Comes Out as Transvestite Trickster
WASHINGTON - Shock-pundit Ann Coulter dismayed her right-wing fans today when she admitted to being a cross-dressing man in Thursday's press conference. "This started as a joke, as satire, and I think that it has just gone to far." he said to a startled press.
Ann Coulter was born Fredrick Guebermann, of Des Moines, IA. Fredrick moved to San Fransisco on the 1980's to start a career in drag shows. There, he worked under several stage names, including "Crystal Dawn" and "Rosie the Rocket"...
Okay, seriously: Chris Matthews, commenting on the contretemps between Ann Coulter and Elizabeth Edwards, calls Coulter a "brilliant writer." By what standard?
Let's look at her writing as writing. Let's focus on style, on wordsmithing ability, not on content. A recent Coulter piece on immigration features this text:
How about Bush enforce the border and then we'll discuss his amnesty plan?As it happens, these sentiments resemble my own. But has she expressed herself well?
He assures us that granting amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants already here won't inspire millions more to run across the border because ... he's going to put infrared lights at the border!
Well, that's a relief. What precisely will infrared lights do again? This is worse than those fake cameras they sell at hardware stores to make it look like you have cameras outside your house. We still need something or someone — say, a wall or a Border Patrol agent — to stop the Mexicans illegally crossing the border as we watch them on the infrared cameras.
The first paragraph is a disaster. In the next two paragraphs, her prose strikes me as no better than competent. The "fake camera" comparison works well enough, but the opening of that sentence -- "This is worse" -- is hazy and inelegant: Good writers eschew pronouns lacking a clear referent. I see no wit here, no well-turned phrases, no striking imagery, no ear for the music of language.
How often have you seen any of those desiderata in Coulter's work? Come to think of it, when was the last time you saw good writing from any well-paid right-wing scribbler?
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, conservatives had talent. I enjoyed William F. Buckley and William Safire even when they infuriated me. P.J. O'Rourke was funny. These days, alas, when you go to the bookstore and pick up the latest reactionary volume by Coulter or Hannity or Savage or O'Reilly or whomever, what do you encounter? One dull sentence after another falls on the page like barbells tossed out of a C-130: Thud, thud, thud, all across the landscape.
Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens write well, but they no longer speak to the audience Coulter addresses. That audience seems to have forgotten what good writing is.
These days, writers who care about craftsmanship don't earn any money from their efforts. They write for unheralded blogs on both the right and left. Meanwhile, publishers help talent-free hacks pay their mortgages -- and cable news pundits tout as "brilliant" authors whose erudition can't match that of a bowl of Rice Krispies.
3 comments:
Chris Matthews doesn't read any of the books whose authors he has on as guests on Hardball. No radio or TV host reads them. Larry King was at least honest enough to admit it and I once heard Dennis Prager boasting about it on his radio show. Likewise, these hosts always say the book is "a great read" or something similar. If they don't offer obligatory compliments, the author may not return. It's all about access.
I don't think Coulter even writes her columns or books herself anymore. Maybe she did in the beginning, but now she's a celebrity no different than Suzanne Sommers hawking her latest diet book on QVC and Larry King. It's celebrity marketing.
She needs to understand the power of the declarative sentence. Hemingway knew it. So should she. It’s quite easy.
(sic) Otherwise, people tend to drift off ,or so I’ve read , and find themselves zoning out (usually, if web-based, people tend to surf away) and completely miss what she was trying to get at, in the first place, and before you know it, a run on sentence has become an entire paragraph. (sic)
(sic) Not to mention, her awful grammar. Not to mention, her over simplified theses. Not to mention, her absolute lack of humor, subtlety, variety in language or verbal dexterity. (sic)
I would refer to her as a "writer" in the most base sense of the word. She’s a hack.
I agree with Joe completely, but going even further, most of these writers do not even have a logic that stands up to scrutiny. When one makes an argument or tries to make a point, aside from facts, evidence or examples, there needs to be a clear line of logic (like 2+2=4) that can be followed. And that needs to be true regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with the conclusion.
It's what is called making sense, or in scientific circles, how a hypothesis is defended.
None of these people make sense to me, even if I occasionally agree with the point they are trying to make(like the immigration issue).
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