Block · one region of the page, as the scanner read it. It may hold a whole story, part of one, several, or an advertisement; stitching blocks into articles is the next step. Text is supplied OCR.
Page 4 · column 3 of 6 · from the scan, no model involved
In our business, the writing business, Sometimes we try too hard. The novelist comes down with adjectivitis, the preacher succumbs to bloviation, and the newspaperman tries his hand at purple prose.
This is what 1 have in mind. Two years ago a sensational story came out of Knoxville about a married woman and a Tennessee editor. They plotted to kill her husband. A reporter for The Associated Press began his story:
"A journalist, he wrote the wrenching story of her struggle to raise a daughter with Down syndrome. Now there’s more to the story. Police say they were lovers, and that he tried to kill her sleeping husband as she watched, a baseball bat in her hands.”
So much for scrambled eggs. The trick for writing effectively about a human drama is not to get dramatic. Heart-wrenching stories will tell themselves.
Some years ago a 91-year-old woman climbed Mount Fuji in Japan. The AP reporter described the event:
“Mrs. Crooks stepped through a special gate marking the top of the sacred 12,385-foot dormant volcano at 3:45 a.m. as a pink sun rose over the horizon and waved an American flag tied to her walking stick.”
Alas, in his effort to be colorful the writer wound up with a pink sun waving an American flag. It is not a trick you will see every day of the week.
A movie critic in Florida, reviewing “White Squall,” tried too hard to say everything at once:
“Tossing the script’s fibs overboard, the picture is more reliable as a male-bonding/rite-o('-passage adventure yarn, with the young hunks fating the challenges of the sea by peeling oil' their shirts under a- tropical sun and indulging in such primal pursuits as playing macho one-upsmanship diving oil the ship’s masts, making primiti\e guttural sounds during a deserted
78.9%