Purple Quill Award for
Most Tortured Sentence
If a journalistic ideal is to further public conversation, then the Providence Monthly succeeded admirably with their recent article ("Class War or Class Act?") in the September 2006 issue. We applaud the ProMo for providing the forum which brought together a diverse array of real estate developers and community organizers for a roundtable discussion of recent developments in Olneyville.
Nonetheless, we must quibble with their copy editing of the article. One paragraph in particular stood out to us like a hammer-struck thumb:
Then came April of 1995, when the Incident put all the cards on the table. A real estate agent for the Armory Revival Company gets caught secretly on candid camera at Rising Sun Mills by Olneyville activist-artists surreptitiously posing as potential buyers while making downright racist comments about the "ghetto" quality of the neighborhood and promises about the company's real estate plans to buy up the entire area to make it "ours."
Leaving aside for a moment the fact that "the Incident" took place earlier this year (and not in 1995), we feel compelled to offer the Purple Quill Award for Most Tortured Sentence to the second one cited above. Go on, read it again, we dare you. To a casual reader, it could seem like these "activist-artists" have been "surreptitiously posing as potential buyers while making downright racist comments about the ghetto" for more than a decade. But that's ass-backwards — wasn't Armory's agent the one "
Caught On Tape?" [ProJo, Sunday April 30 2006] The Purple Quill Award-winning sentence in this otherwise commendable article unintentionally demonstrates a classic propaganda technique: vague language and mangled grammar can generate critical thinking errors in readers. We'd like to encourage the
ProMo to practice semantic hygiene, for the sake of their expanding readership. We're trying to step up our game too.
