The great English broadcaster Ray Hudson once said of the great Argentine footballer Juan Román Riquelme, “Look at him, so languid, look at him walking. He’s like a big, beautiful zombie, Riquelme. He just strolls around…like smoke off a cigarette.” Hudson values hyperbole over precision—or at least succumbs to the former—for he suffers from a sort of fanatic epilepsy when he works. Hudson told me, “When that spotlight’s on you, and you’re calling a game, you’re in the moment, instantaneous, and the selection of words, phrases, and anecdotes are improvised. There’s very little time for actual thought. There’s very little time for reflection on what you’re actually going to say.” And Hudson’s quips, spontaneous and unedited, have gained him a reputation as one of the most notorious announcers in all of sports.
Hudson made his career first as a soccer player—for Newcastle United in England, and later for various teams in the defunct North American Soccer League. But he is best known for announcing the modern game for GolTV. Commentary for a soccer match, more so than in any other sport, is like the musical accompaniment to ballet. Therefore as a broadcaster, Hudson is comparable to the conductor of an orchestra playing in the pit beneath a stage of dancers; he adds context and emotion to the drama. No wonder, then, that he often likens footballers to beautiful women. “I’m telling you man,” Hudson once said of FC Barcelona’s seventeen-year-old striker, Bojan Krkic, “this kid could be the best thing on two legs since Sophia Loren.”
Unlike most American sports, soccer is a fluid game, with frequent changes of possession and few clear, numeric statistics to evaluate. Soccer is improvisational, whereas American football is regimented. In football, plays are designed then executed, to greater or lesser success. In soccer, players practice formations and then improvise within a spontaneous framework. Therefore soccer, whose action is as constant as light, requires a reactive, jazz-like call. “Most people,” Hudson said, “have no concept of how challenging and demanding it is to call a game. I mean, we’re seeing those pictures the same second you’re seeing them.” There are few numbers to pore over, so the color man’s broadcast, if done well, strives, not to investigate the efficacy of a play, but to transliterate excitement. “When it gets into the red zone,” Hudson said, “when it gets into that area where something truly special might develop, that’s where I come out of the long grass. That’s when it’s showtime for me. And that preparation takes on its own dynamic. If it’s an intoxicating game that has all the ingredients for a beautiful, hot stew, then what are you going to do?”
Stylistically, Hudson is a compositor of metaphor. Like the critic and memoirist Anatole Broyard, who describing a lover once wrote, “Her waist was so small, it cut her in two, like a split-personality, or two schools of thought,” Hudson is disinterested in, or even incapable of, inventing basic similes. His description of a goal scored during a meeting of the Mexican and Argentine national sides—“Heinze jumps up like Rudolf Nureyev, beautiful, [and] stabs it home. But it’s Riquelme, man… [His movement is] impossible, like pouring a pint of beer into a shot glass”—suggests, if not a frenetic mind, an uncontainable one. His mouth can’t always keep up with his brain. “It’s not within me,” Hudson said. To be pedestrian with any of my descriptions. I’m just incapable of it. I mean, you hear me now. Once you start me, you cannot stop me.”
I asked him to tell me about the most exciting match he ever announced, and he thought immediately of the 38th round of the 2007 La Liga championship (judging by Youtube views, it is also his most famous). Hudson’s announcing is passionate to the point of violence. To give a little context to the game, Hudson was the color analyst, and Phil Schoen the broadcaster, for Real Madrid’s season-ending match at the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium. The morning of the 17th, Real Madrid was tied at the top of the table with its perennial political and sporting rival, FC Barcelona. Earlier in the season, in their head-to-head match-ups, Madrid had taken four of six points from Barcelona, beating the Catalans at home and drawing away. This meant that if by day’s end both teams were victorious in their matches, Madrid would win the league.
Both clubs kicked off simultaneously. By halftime, Barcelona was laying waste to Gimnastic 3-0. Madrid, on the other hand, was trailing 0-1 to Mallorca at home. If the result stood, Barcelona would win the title. But then in the 68th minute Madrid scored, leveling their match. In the 78th they scored again, taking the lead. When Jose Reyes scored two minutes later, he confirmed Madrid’s victory, and with it, the title.
“The world was watching,” Hudson remembered, “and you felt something historical was going to happen. Also in that game, there was a good bit of jousting between Phil [Schoen] and me, because the camera kept cutting to these people in the stands, these Hollywood celebrities. I remember in particular for that game Tom Cruise [and Rafael Nadal] were there. And Phil kept going on about Tom Cruise while this gladiatorial fight to the death was happening before us.” As we talked, Hudson’s voice began to rise. “And I got so incensed that I nearly lost it.”
Recapping the match live as time ran out, Hudson said of Madrid’s goalkeeper, Iker Casillas, who by his estimation had saved the game, and who had cried in joy after the definitive third goal got scored, “That’s why you see those beautiful tears from a man whose heart is bursting.” The camera, here, cut away to the crowd, where Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes were kissing triumphantly in the stands. Perhaps to annoy him, Schoen asked if Hudson’s comment were directed at Cruise. Hudson screamed, “Would you stop talking about tennis players and stupid Hollywood actors, Phil! It’s the gladiators out there, man.” Then, with great disgust, Hudson went on: “Tom Cruise. Give me a break. If he smelled a soccer jockstrap, he’d faint dead away.”
Between his playing and commentating days, Hudson has seen countless goals—and many magnificent ones—but one in particular stands out above them, as Real Madrid’s definitive game in June 2007 rises in his mind above the other matches he’s called. Ronaldinho, the Brazilian striker who played his best football in Barcelona, once scored a goal against Villa Real that during the match, along side other hyberboles (“As electrifying as a hairdryer thrown into a hot tub” ) Hudson claimed was tantamount to religious art.
Hudson described the goal to me this way. “It was an overhead kick, at an angle, just into the corner of the box, and I called it, if I remember correctly, ‘A Bernini sculpture of a goal, that rivals the Ecstasy of St. Teresa.’ Now, there are probably two people around the United States tuning in who had even heard of Bernini. But for me, it was that good. And in my opinion, instances like that need to be compared to something monumental, to something of an exquisiteness completely unique. And that sculpture came immediately to mind.” He went on: “[During the replays] there was this one wonderful shot of the defender who had been the closest to Ronny, who had just seen this goal, and he was simply stupefied. I described him like Lot’s wife, turning to salt. And then the next second the camera cut away to this little blonde boy in the stands, this little cherub in a Barcelona shirt, and he started smiling. I remember saying, ‘His big bright eyes have just grown the size of saucer plates. He’s never seen anything like this in his life, and he never will again.’”
I did not grow up a sports fan. I played soccer and baseball, and later golf, but my father, despite coaching a number of teams I played on, didn’t watch games on TV. By the time I got to college, being a sports fan seemed primitive to me. I fancied myself an artist. Entertainment, I thought, should be a strictly intellectual pursuit, so I watched a lot of emotionally vacant French films, and read a bunch of calamitous, dystopian novels. Back then I thought of Bande á parte and Blood Meridian as the pinnacles of culture.
Then in October of 2002, I was staying at my parents’ house. I’d dropped out of college in New York two days before the start of my sophomore year and returned to California. I was drinking too much in Brooklyn, but more significantly, my girlfriend lived in my hometown. Fittingly, though, a month after I got back, she left for school in Irvine. Finding myself alone and acutely depressed one Saturday evening, I turned on the sixth game of the World Series. The Giants, who because of their proximity to my hometown I’d been a nominal fan of as a boy, led the Angels until the seventh. But with one out in that inning, Dusty Baker pulled his starter, Russ Ortiz, who to that point hadn’t allowed a run. The reliever, Félix Rodríguez, promptly gave up a three run homer. In the eighth, the Angel’s third baseman, Troy Glaus, doubled in two more runs. The Giants lost.
The next night I watched the seventh game, which was a sort of underwhelming catastrophe. By the third, all the runs that were to get scored had been. The Giants almost rallied in the ninth, getting two men on with only one out. But Kenny Lofton flied out to right-center to end the Series, in favor of the Angels. I broke down in tears. It’s the only time, before or since, that I’ve cried over a game. But that loss, and my illogical reaction to it, proved to me that sport has the capacity to evoke, or at least unlock, genuine emotion.
Since then I’ve been a dedicated fan—first of baseball, then of soccer, and finally of mixed martial arts and cycling. As a writer, sports provide for me a finite dramatic stage where a protagonist and an antagonist attempt metaphorically (though in fighting sometimes literally) to kill each other. The plots of the stories, if I’m being reductive, are repetitive. But the distillation of competition, thematic and actual, is the stuff of art. One night in Boston, after the Oakland A’s (I am, again, a geographical fan) got swept by the Detroit Tigers in the 2006 American League Championship Series—a defeat that ruined my mood for the remainder of the playoffs—I felt inspired to write on my wall when I got home from the bar, “If I’m not allowed to care terribly about a game men play, neither should I be affected by anything else man invents.”
This is why I like listening to Ray Hudson. He takes sports even more seriously than I do. If, for me, soccer (or baseball or cycling or football) is a representation of human struggle, and is in that sense a means to dissecting and then producing art, for Hudson the game itself is the end—and therefore art itself. “What an absolute scientific goal again,” he once said of a Riquelme masterpiece. “[It’s the great Argentine] who is the Einstein of it…Stand up! Get out of your sofas and applaud if you’re a football fan, because the poets just wrote a sonnet to all of us.” Soccer, for Hudson, is the conflation of science and art, equal parts spontaneity and technique. But when I spoke to him, he was rather dismissive of his role as a broadcaster. “I’ve never had much foresight into what I’m doing. Literally, when the lights go on, I just get out there and tap dance my way through it… I use my very minor knowledge of the English language, and my passion for the game, to accentuate a match.” When everything is said and done, though, the novelist only strives to accentuate the world around him. He observes and he comments. And if that commentary is sufficiently careful and emotional, he commemorates the action permanently.
In a Slate piece published back in the fall, Kitty Burns Florey took on the unenviable task of diagramming the utterances of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Florey, the author of Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog, clearly has a unusual predilection for sentence diagramming (which I’m pretty sure the Army Field Manual prohibits as a form of torture.) Nonetheless, her project was more journalistic than aesthetic; she suggested that diagramming a sentence “provides insight into the mind of its perpetrator.”
Perhaps, rather than having some grammatical genius that allows him to seem for confident and masculine than he may actually be, he is merely a product of several years of Warriner's English Grammar.
These are not even the words of Obama, but that of his speech writer, whose job is to make him look good. Therefore, diagramming a sentence from his speech should say nothing about the Messiah.
Kirk, Tx.
Kirk,
What we think we know can often prevent us from learning new things. Last year's Time piece on Obama's speechwriting process:
http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1837368,00.html
Neil
Kirk,
Are you saying Obama's speechwriter is scripting not only his prepared addresses, but ostensibly spontaneous responses to press conference questions (which was the context for this sentence)? I'm not sure I follow your line of argument, but would be happy to know more…
Neil,
The article does mention "the 27 year old wunderkind," Favreau who helps him with his speeches, so which are Obama's words and which are Favreau's?
Garth,
I certainly wouldn't be surprised if Obama rehearses his answers to questions that he anticipates. He is the slickest politician since…well, Bill Clinton, so polishing answers just as with speeches would be easy to imagine. After all, any politician who can convince the American people that a trillion dollar spending bill is going to stimulate the economy certainly gets props from me.
Kirk, Tx.
PS Garth, at least we agree on Bolano.
Goodness. It must be hard work, Kirk, patrolling the entire internet for instances of flattering or admiring statements about the new President of United States which can be turned into sneering implications that those who flatter or admire him have switched off their brains.
How do you find the time?
@Goodness. Or rather, how does someone find the time to diagram the president's speeches?
Kirk,
A speechwriter can only do so much. Like Obama, George W Bush had a team of 3 competent speechwriters yet he couldn't even put together two words coherently. The job of a speechwriter is to write in the speaker's own voice, not be the voice. If you're implying that Obama is just a voicebox, you're sorely mistaken. You've got to be pretty good with language to make the president of the Harvard Law Review.
What troubles me about this sentence is not its grammar, but its content. Obama sees the important issue of bringing to book people who abused executive power under Bush administration as "looking backward"? Ethics are at issue here, and unfortunately Obama has failed to live up to his own pre-election standards on the question of accountability. Check out the delays and settlements he recommended in the subpeona of Rove and the nod he gave to the Justice system to basically uphold security certificates and such from the Bush era. He is not willing to deprive himself of the vast and unconstitutional powers that he inherited from the Bush administration. This will be the most serious credibility issue with his presidency.
Could we have some similar diagram also for Bush speech? please.
I totally agree Obama is a great communicator, which in most instances today means he reads well from a teleprompter. And I concur that Bush was perhaps the worst communicator we've ever had. Laughable. But actions speak louder than words, so after all of Obama's campaign promises he has a mountain to climb.
Kirk,Tx.
Kirk,
It's your cult that wanted Bush's War, so that they could act out The Left Behind series, for "Jesus". I'm not surprised that logic and facts are regarded as the enemy.
Sorry I don't fall into your category of Republican Evangelical. I am an atheist that happens to be a conservative in most cases.
If you think that the Bush administration regarded logic and facts as the enemy you aint seen nothin' yet!
Kirk,Tx.
I don't think magic-talking is a sign of respect. If american people were to be treated as adults the truth would plain and clear (adults can handle the truth, right?). Instead everybody is left to draw his own conclusion (magic talking alert!). The wrongdoers will be prosecuted, or not? Keeping an eye on the future is more important than justice or not? The same political-correctness-BS just in a nicer package.
This MUST be put up side-by-side with a Bush quote. Please, I'm begging.
I've met Obama (I was at the University of Chicago when he taught there). This isn't from a speechwriter; he's always spoken like this.
The sentence analyzed exposes one of Obama's serious weaknesses – lack of precision and clarity.
When Obama's finally gotten to the period at the end of the long sentence, the listener has no more insight into Obama's views or probable future actions than they did before he uttered the first word of the sentence. While a casual observer (or an Obama worshiper) thinks the question has been answered, it was not. He could either prosecute everyone in sight within the Bush administration (of course, only for "clear" violations), or he could do absolutely nothing (of course, in the interest of "looking forward").
I am hopeful that Obama's seemingly intentional ambiguity and failure to take a clear position is a political technique he reserves for dodging domestic issues and that he lets experienced people craft his messages for the international stage. In international matters, failure to communicate effectively and clearly can have serious consequences including unnecessary escalation of tensions to the level of warfare.
The article makes fun of Bush 43 for the statement: "You're with us or you're against us" [I believe the author used a fragment of Bush's sentence here, but that's not material to this discussion]. However, the purpose of speaking is to communicate. It is reasonable to agree or disagree with Bush's position, but it's impossible to not better understand Bush's position and attitude after hearing this statement – he views sitting on the sidelines on the issue of terrorism to be equivalent to supporting terrorism.
If you watch his many interviews or read his two self-authored books and countless articles dating back to his law school days and early marriage life and on through the present, you will see that Obama has always talked this way. His themes, views, syntax and delivery have been remarkably consistent. Say what you want about him, but his voice – with or without a speechwriter's help – is authentically his. To say otherwise is mere ignorance or delusion.
To all who believe Obama's statement is obfuscating but that there's clarity in Bush's "you're with us or you're against us" statement: You are wrong.
Obama here says we will enforce the laws, but he's not about to set the government toward consuming itself with second-guessing all dubious Bush Administration decisions; that should evidence emerge of clear wrong-doing, your title and your friends will not save you from justice, but that his administration is not about to launch a comprehensive witch hunt. This is pragmatic.
Bush's alleged clarity is anything but pragmatic. If an overall long-term ally like Mexico or France opposes our invasion of Iraq because they find our charges of Iraqi terrorism-abetting to be unpersuasive — are they now "with" the terrorists who perpetrated 9/11? Is Russia "with" the terrorists, or Syria — or Hamas? It would seem they are. And yet we permit them to go on existing — which makes us "with" the terrorists, doesn't it? Sorry, but I never saw the clarity in Bush's black-vs-white jingoism.
I am pleased to have a president with an adult ability to examine the world and address its complexity. That serves the national interest well.
Logosfera, I would argue that letting people come to their own conclusions is, in fact, treating them like adults–especially when compared with the paternalistic alternatives that you offer.
Secondly, in Obama's answer you can find answers to every question you raised. Will wrongdoers be prosecuted? He says yes, when it is clear that they in fact did wrong. Is keeping an eye on the future more important and "justice" (which, in fairness, is not synonymous with "looking backward" which is what he actually said)? Yes, he says he's more interested in looking forward than dwelling on the past. These are not contradictory–He's more interested in the future than the past, but when clear wrongdoing is occurred then those accountable should be prosecuted.
I think you do a great job showing how Obama's brain works as it is manifest in his construction of syntax and design. He's a remarkable thinker, strategist and writer. I think his sentence structure demonstrates all the complexity he brings to the issue, his understanding of opposing ideas, and an aesthetic sense of parallelism and rhythm.
It's an odd world we live in when sentence structure *is* construed as indicative of morality, but actions aren't.
Stop addressing Kirk the Texas troll. Internet 101, people.
The commas are misplaced in that sentence. Here I fixed it for you!
"My view is also that nobody's above the law and if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen but that, generally speaking, I'm more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards"
Unfortunately this quote didn't contain the one mistake which I observe fairly regularly in Obama's speech: the use of "a" before a noun beginning with a vowel. For example, he says "launch a attack" instead of "launch an attack." I've also heard several friends who were raised in Hawaii speak similarly, so maybe it's a local Hawaiian thing?
The semicolon was correct. When the first clause contains commas, the punctuation mark before the conjunction should be a semicolon for the sake of clarity.
Yr pedantic trivia for the day
Anonymous @ 6:01:
It isn't clear what you hope to imply about the comparative morality of the actions of Presidents Bush and Obama, if anything, in this thread about clear communication.
No one here is claiming that sentence structure indicates morality, only that it indicates a person's thought patterns. Sentences that become complex without becoming unclear indicate something very promising about the mind producing them. That's all.
Using "a" for the *unstressed* article in all positions is hardly localized to Hawaii; I've heard it all my life. I say it – and I've never been to Hawaii. Many people do it, even if they wouldn't write it; it's simply a phonological feature of a large number of English dialects. You may call it a "mistake", but the difference between "an" and "a" has been a fluid one in English for a long time.
@Ridger–
I think it's the glottal stop that arises between the "a" and following vowel sound that reminds me of the spoken Hawaiian language. Hawaiian is replete with consecutive vowels that are separated by glottal stops. I was just wondering if that found its way into English as spoken in Hawaii.
As for it being a "mistake," I was taught that it was incorrect, both in speech and writing.
Why does it matter that it's unstressed??
What with all the sentence diagramming? He still didn't say anything. Typical politician – platitudes and no substance.
The second "that" clause isn't really parallel to the other two, because it's subordinated to the "if" clause
In my experience as an applied linguist specializing in the American accent, "a" and a following vowel sound overall tends to be more of a male characteristic, and then secondarily, a sub-30 trait.
"I certainly wouldn't be surprised if Obama rehearses his answers to questions that he anticipates."
Non sequitur; you asserted that these were Obama's speech writers words, not his — strongly implying that they were part of a speech. Your response simply confirms what was evident from the first — that you're a grossly dishonest person.
Can we go easy on Kirk, folks? He's been commenting here for a while and is a Bolano fan, which is two marks in his favor, and while his first comment did strike me as a bit piquant, I'd like to invoke (invent?) the law of proportional snark.
Beautiful, how elegant, like a flower!
Thanks Garth!
Nothing against Obama or his supporters. His English is that of a well-healed Ivy Leaguer, I just don't agree with his policies.
Bolano Rules!
Kirk, the "Texas Troll"
Sheesh … You would have thought that Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS) would have ended on January 20, 2009, but clearly, it hasn't.
"You would have thought that Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS) would have ended on January 20, 2009, but clearly, it hasn't."
Seeing as his two wars and 5 trillion dollars of national debt are still with us, I see no reason to let up.
Kirk,
You are welcome to disagree with Obama's policies, but your critique is not based on much more than unexamined assumptions and rigidified bias, with a liberal (muahaha) dose of snarkiness thrown in for good (read: bad) measure.
This, unfortunately, is a dire disease of the conservative mind. The previous President and his slavish followers being prime examples. Listening to the likes of Rush Limbaugh only releases more toxins into the body politic and offer no cures at all.
"Bush Derangement Syndrome" not letting up? That's nothing — 8 years later, conservatives are STILL blaming stuff on Clinton.
Kirk, Obama's been in office a few weeks. Bush was in there screwing things up for 8 years. I'm not willing to talk down the new president, on whom we all depend, for a few years yet.
I want him to have his chance to make things better, and I'll support him in much of what he does in his early days in office.
Considering that conservatives spent 7 years shrieking about how unAmerican it was to question the president — calling the rest of us traitors and haters (and a lot of you are still doing it) — I'd think you guys would be willing to give THIS president a little leeway.
@Kirk: "If you think that the Bush administration regarded logic and facts as the enemy you aint seen nothin' yet!"
Really? This administration is going to play looser with logic and facts than the *Bush administration*?! Now we *know* you're a troll.
There is everything to respect about the wise words of a thoughtful, respectable and intelligent president of the United States – something we have not enjoyed for a while.
But the sentence in question is remarkably simple; so much so that if it represents such cause for celebration by the author, one would wonder whether he too shared this property.
I refuse to believe that we have reached the stage where anything uttered in public that is not incomprehensible garbage is reason for elation. Things have surely not grown that bad yet.
I never said anything about Bush…
As I stated before Obama is an eloquent communicator but what he is communicating is his desire to make us a socialist nation.
After 7 years of the New Deal, Treasury Secretary Morgenthau said that all the money that had been spent had not worked. Trying to spend our way out of recession is an exercise in futility.
Kirk, Tx.
I'm thinking Bush supporters are just jealous that our president is no longer as stupid as they are.
@Kirk, that's a "well-heeled Ivy Leaguer", not "well-healed".
– a not-so-well-heeled Ivy Leaguer in VA
i kinda like your post! :D love it. thanks for posting :D
I chuckle every time someone uses the phrase "socialist nation" or even the word "socialism" today, in reference to Obama. It's right out of the GOP playbook.
The funny thing is, the GOP lost this election, and they're not bright enough to notice they continue to lose ground. Their talking points just aren't getting any traction, except among the very small number of Sarah Palin syncophants.
Keep on digging in your heels, Republicans, and do your best to wreck the country even more than George Bush managed. Stay right out in the open, spreading your lies, where we can see you. The rest of us will get on with business while you squabble in the mud.
Hank,
Obama wants to "spread the wealth," how is that not Socialism?
I believe that the GOP message is getting traction…They're certainly not going down without a fight about this "stimulus" package.
Again, George Bush is no longer in the White House!!!
But I would rather have the country wrecked by Bush than utterly destroyed by Obama's policies.
Furthermore, I believe that those that pulled the lever for Obama will live to regret it when they are giving half of their paychecks for programs that only make individuals and businesses more reliant on government.
Texas Troll
I'm sorry, but I just find it hilarious that Obama making the US a "socialist nation" (which I don't think will happen) is regarded as a bad thing. I, personally feel that we should work to close the ENORMOUS gap between the rich and the poor, and since those who are well-off obviously aren't doing it themselves, I think the government should assume more responsability for that.
"I chuckle every time someone uses the phrase "socialist nation" or even the word "socialism" today, in reference to Obama. It's right out of the GOP playbook."
Sorry, but there are more than knee-jerk conservatives who think that running a huge deficit is fundamentally immoral. The impulse to control and direct is not unique to the right; you on the left employ the same tools for different ends. The real issue is individual liberty vs. statism, *classical* liberalism versus collectivism, whether progressive or conservative.
Nationalization of the banking sector doesn't amount to socialism? Read some Von Mises. Please.
Very erudite, I’m sure. I think by now we’ve all concluded that Obama is a thinker, that he doesn’t go off half cocked like Bush and his ball-and-Cheney. But what bothers so me about Obama’s use of language is his frequent grammatical mistakes. He says things like: America is doing our duty. Correct version: American is doing ITS duty or We are doing our duty. He says things like: President Bush has invited Michelle and I to the White House.
How can someone who has attended Harvard and taught constitutional law not be able to master such mundane and fundamental concepts as which pronoun agrees with its noun? I honestly can’t understand. His grammar is helping to dumb down America.
Even Mrs. Obama uses this construction. She said, “I am a woman who loves my husband.” She too has been privileged to receive a wonderful education, but helps to dumb down the language.
Come on, Obamas! Start cracking those grammar books with your kids!
Mae
Socialism aside, I’m no “grammar queen,” but this sentence needs a lot of work. Too many “that’s,” a useless “also,” and if one moves “forward,” why would they not alternatively move “backward” (minus the s).
For example:
–My view is that no one is above the law. But if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, people should be prosecuted as ordinary citizens. In general, I am more interested in looking to the future, rather than the past.–
If Obama could put together a really great string of words off the cuff, then, he might be considered a great speaker. Otherwise, in my opinion, he needs all the help he can get–including a teleprompter.
I’m anxious to see an update to this article. How does “word salad” fare in the realm of sentence diagramming.