Eugene David ...The One-Minute Pundit |
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Sunday, April 29, 2007
Learning how to write at America's greatest newspapers:
Then there is Hagedorn's prose. In her acknowledgments she makes particular mention of the Wall Street Journal, "where I learned how to write well," a quite astonishing boast in and of itself but all the more so when one considers the more than 500 pages of evidence to the contrary. Hagedorn has never met a cliché she didn't like: "To many it meant that Bolshevists had struck the Pacific Northwest like lightning bolts, soon to cause the nation to burst into the flames of revolution," or "It was there that the rolling wave of hope from the Western Front met the rising tide of fear and intolerance back home," or "But that message had no lasting significance and fell like the leaves of autumn into a rushing river." Hagedorn, her publisher tells us, "has taught writing at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism and at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism." If that makes you wonder about the standards of literacy at the country's "best" schools of journalism, well, you are not alone. ? [SIC] Who put that question mark in there? Paul "UNFORGETTABLE" Farhi?
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