Who knows what goes on in a person' mind. It makes me wonder if being alone for long (and that includes drowning in books) and thinking a lot about life is depressing. These are some thoughts that this story provoked in me. Back to Journalism:
The reporter has done a good job of getting quotes from the deceased's mother, sister and roommate. While we are talking about ledes, I like this lede because it is action-packed. I also like the use of words "In the end" which are symbolic of Heisman's suicide as well as "Day of Atonement" which also syncs with the idea of death. I wish the lede was shorter though. Instead of crafting a 56-word long sentence, I would cut the extra 20 words as:
In the end, no one knows why Heisman, 35, fired one shot from a silver revolver into his right temple, on the top step of Memorial Church in Harvard Yard, on the Jewish Day of Atonement.
The facts that he was a Jew or that he was learned could follow in the body.
I agree with you about the wordiness of the lede. It is very descriptive, but the long phrases take away from the flow of the sentence. I also think "in the end" in the first sentence is not necessary, but that you should definitely include Heisman's first name.
ReplyDeleteAfter reading this whole story, it seems that this journalist enjoys writing very long sentences. Too many sentence are set off with multiple commas and incorporate too many phrases. I think that reducing the wordiness of the whole story would help with its flow.
However, I do really like this sentence and the choice of this quote. The descriptive phrases describing Heisman's suicide note, although excessive, seem to work well with this sentence:
At the end of his note, a dense, scholarly work with 1,433 footnotes, a 20-page bibliography, and more than 1,700 references to God and 200 references to the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, Heisman sums up his experiment:
“Every word, every thought, and every emotion come back to one core problem: life is meaningless,’’ he wrote. “The experiment in nihilism is to seek out and expose every illusion and every myth, wherever it may lead, no matter what, even if it kills us.’’
I think that use of extreme and lengthy description should be done with moderation. If every line in the story is composed of long and very descriptive sentences, the news story becomes a very tedious read. But the occasional descriptive sentence can really add some flavor.