Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Reporter Blows Entire Lifetime Allotment of Commas in One Go

I would like to call your attention to this story, "A woman surfaces in the Hudson River landscape."

Not because it's a Women Do, but because it's truly a stunning piece of work. It tacks back and forth between commas and em-dashes like a drunken mule on a pile of rocks.

Because of its locale, Cragsmoor — like Palenville — enjoyed an early period as an artists’ colony, with names like E. L. Henry, Frederick Dellenbaugh, George Inness, and, later on, Charles Courtney Curran bringing the attention of the nation to the raw beauty and majestic landscape that is literally perched atop Ordovician pebble soil — a distinctly different look and feel to the lay of the land than anywhere else in the Hudson Valley.


It has such an air of demented melancholy to it. If I were smarter, I would build a robot that could write like that and make it answer all my emails.