Too much information

Yikes. Caught this run-on sentence in a morning sports column about an NBA playoff game; felt compelled to read it aloud to my wife over breakfast to help ease her into the day (see second sentence):

The effort wasn't the issue Tuesday night. The Bucks hung with the Hawks about as long as humanly possible without the kind of center that might have put a cease-and-desist order on some of the mismatches that continued to occur with regularity on a floor where the home team almost never loses.

This is called trying too hard, and this sportswriter, unfortunately, makes a habit of it. The sentence does make some sense, but only with too much head-scratching on the reader’s part. Had the writer, and copy editor, read this aloud before turning it in, I highly doubt it would have passed muster.

In most nonfiction writing, if you’re doing acrobatics trying to make a sentence work or to be clever, or making a single sentence do too much heavy lifting, it’s a good sign you’re about to torture the reader. Put the poor thing out of its misery and start over!

-- Ron Kovach, senior editor, The Writer

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