Andy Kessler, who wrote "How We Got Here," is one of my favorite business columnists. I catch him in The Wall Street Journal whenever he makes it onto the op-ed page. Today, he has a column titled "Internet Wrecking Ball," about the so-called "net-neutrality" issue.
I call out a couple of minor boo-boos (not to pick on Kessler but because I've got to post an item, and a bird in the hand is twittering at me):
"I personally would climb telephone poles on my street..." If you're doing the climbing, Andy, you can't outsource it. It's going to be personal.
"Yes, despite an overabundance..." (Part of the definition of the word abundance is "oversufficient quantity or supply," so overabundance is overly oversufficient and going over-over the top. But aha! you say, as if you've lured me into a rusty bear trap that has snapped violently around my ankle: Why, then, is the word overabundance in the dictionary? Because smart people who write dictionaries sometimes screw up.
Can you use overabundance? Sure. You can use colloquialisms too. But my point is: edit paranoid. The more critically you look at every word, the more you will whittle your copy into cogent prose and communicate clearer thought.
1 comment:
Fascinating. He comes to the correct conclusion, despite a thorough failure to understand what Comcast did, and why it did it.
Sadly, because he gets the explanation wrong, he is making the "net neutrality" (whatever that is) debate even more turbid than it had been.
--brian
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