Repeats

Don’t you just love local newspapers, the way their reporters write their pieces and then have them edited – or not? Here are a couple of sentences from last week’s paper about a proposed market upgrade in the town:

… the owner of the High Street site … said the current market would carry on as normal at the present site.

And in the very next sentence:

He said: “We will be carrying on as normal…”

One thing’s for sure: we know that the current market will carry on as normal. But why is this fact repeated, especially in the following line? Do they (the reporters and editors) really think that the readers are dumb and need things explained twice? This is something I see time and time again in the local press.

While on the topic of smart writing, I posted a few lines about using common courtesy when writing to an editor of an anthology to which you hope to contribute. You can read them on The AlchemyPress website.