Hello again, frequent Friday Follies followers! (Say that 10 times fast!)
Today’s abomination – just one BIG one:
“Yet, ‘Caddyshack'”s double bogey road from concept to movie immortality was plagued with egotistical clashes, countless bouts of unpredictability, on set debauchery after the cameras finished rolling each day during production, a first-time director who never knew what a camera angle was, and a 400-page screen treatment in which some of its most memorable scenes were not even included and many of them were developed while principal photography took place (ironically enough, the Baby Ruth pool scene was part of the original shooting script).”
Have you managed to catch your breath yet? That was, if you noticed, ALL ONE SENTENCE. Okay, let’s look at it step by step.
- First of all, kudos are due to this writer for the few positives: He actually remembered to put a hyphen between first and time, thus producing “first-time director.” He also inserted one between “400” and “page.” He even spelled “its” correctly without an apostrophe, knowing that you only put one in there when it’s (!) a contraction of it is.
- The first error, though, occurs where he forgot the hyphen that should go in double-bogey road . He also forgot to put it in on-set debauchery. You also may have noticed the typo in Caddyshack'”s, where he added a double quotation mark after the apostrophe for some strange reason. Normally I don’t cite typos, but here I was on a roll, so what the heck. 😁
- My third point is the utter insanity of the sentence length itself. If this
ragnewspaper had an editor or proofreader it sure would help! Such shoddy writing. Grr. Let’s see if the Grammar Cop can fix it. How about this:
Yet, Caddyshack’s double-bogey road from concept to movie immortality was plagued with egotistical clashes, countless bouts of unpredictability, and on-set debauchery after the cameras finished rolling each day during production. It also had a first-time director who never knew what a camera angle was, and a 400-page screen treatment in which some of its most memorable scenes were not even included. In fact, many scenes were developed while principal photography took place. (Ironically enough, the Baby Ruth pool scene was part of the original shooting script).
You’ll note that the quotation marks around Caddyshack are gone now; they aren’t necessary. So what do you think? There are, of course, many other ways to amend this horror of a sentence. Step right up and try your luck! 😁
Crossed Eyes and Dotted Tees 
Perhaps the writer was trying to be included in the Guinness Book of World Records for the longest sentence. However, the Grammar Cop arrested the writer and the Grammar Judge threw the book at him. Case closed! 😀
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Boom! (Where’s a gavel when we need one!) 😀
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That was a marvelous rescue. I’m happy to have left it in your capable hands.
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Thank you, Anne. I so love fixing this cra- I mean, stuff!
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That’s proof that you are an excellent grammar cop.
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Why thankee kindly ma’am! I try! 😁
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You succeed. 😊
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Sorry, I just regained consciousness. I had passed out trying to read it in one breath. Great job Ellie.
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Lolol!!! Thanks Ron!!
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That was one long paragraph, er sentence. My boss likes doing that and I could fall asleep proofreading it. 🙂 I did notice that misplaced quote right off the bat, but are you saying you don’t need to put the name of a movie in quotations? How about a book – use italics rather than quotations? I use quotes for books or newspapers and have used quotes for movies or TV shows as well, so I am curious. I just follow the style book I used back at Wayne State, but bearing in mind I graduated in 1978. In 1978, our style book said an elderly person was 85 years old, or older – I have heard radio newscasts where the person is mid-50s and they call them elderly – wrong, wrong, wrong. My favorite thing I learned back when I was taking my core classes for the journalism program, was that you never have a “dead body” … it is a body and to use “dead” before body is redundant. But I hear the expression used all the time when I listen to the news.
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I like to use italics. In the example I quoted, it was from a long article and the title was already mentioned numerous times, so I didn’t think it was necessary. He, the writer, used quotation marks every time. Yuck. xo
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Yes, I agree if you overuse the quotation marks – it is not a clean look with all that clutter with the quote marks. But, I’ve always used them when writing about a movie or TV program …. .in one paragraph, I thought it looked excessive sometimes. About three or four years ago, I italicized a quote and the italics code stayed in the text and the next post I wrote carried that italics code. I went back and removed the italics from the quote but it didn’t help, and, I even replaced the entire text and updated it. I didn’t want to delete the post as I liked the post. I had to contact WordPress and ask them what happened. They found the code and fixed it … it was years before I ever used italics again and a couple of weeks ago the same thing happened. I was able to go to the top of the new post and click off italics, but that issue happened in the old editing format. I like italics better so I will go to italics from now on, except when relaying a conversation.
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