See what you think about this poorly written article

Monday, October 19, 2009

I'm interested in historical sites so I started reading Clinton Childhood Home to Become National Park on Fox News under leisure topics. Well forget the topic. I was so entralled, better yet appalled, that such an article could be published as is. I would expect better from professionals of journalism. Since it was an Associated Press release I'm not sure of the authorship.



I love the power of words. Even the way I titled my blog post "See what you think about this poorly written article" I've hoped to sway you to my side. I could have just said "See what you think about this written article", but by adding the word "poorly", the reader is already expecting to see something distasteful to the senses. This article was awkwardly written and confusing in flow of paragraphs and I never changed my opinion that reading it was uncomfortable.

I could not get past the first sentence and kept reading it over and over for my brain to comprehend the sentence structure. I knew what the sentence meant, but it was not telling me in the correct order. My brain thought Clinton lived in Julia Chester Hospital until age 4 instead of the house. In the very second sentence why did the author even bother to tell me this information? Who cares if the home was occupied if they are not going to tell me who occupied it? The article jumps around and is not organized in any fashion as my brain is also forced to jump around and sort out suitable information. For instance, next I’m reading about when the house became a museum and oh,... a visitor’s gift shop was added later. Then it skips to how the house was the center of Clintons life for 10 years, then back to the furniture in the house, then to profound statements of the museum director, then to Clintons grandfather, then to this dumb statement by the museum director out in the middle of no where "This is not lost on a little child with wide eyes and big ears". Reading further, I wanted to gag with this statement by the same director, "People want to stand on sacred ground". At one point my brain just stalled on when it started talking about “Virginia’s bedroom”. I’m assumingVirginia is Mr. Clinton’s mother? It would have been nice to have been introduced properly. That did not feel right just being thrown in there by the author. There seemed to be lots of name dropping in the article in order to give the boyhood home of Clinton some credence. Vince Foster is mentioned, Uncle Buddy, some vague other house not opened to visitors, the date Hillary’s father died, and then this stray sentence ended the article with, “Clinton said in his autobiography, "My Life," that the South Hervey Street home "certainly is the place I associate with awakening to life" and that it "still holds deep memories."


Reading the article about the boyhood home of Clinton was uncomfortable because of the structure of the article itself. It was as if the author had put a whole bunch of sentences into a box, shook up the box and then dumped the box of sentences upside down on a piece of paper and let stay where they fell in no particular order. I did not feel endeared by this article. I had no desire to visit this place. I did not learn any new facts from this story. I was only more confused by the lack of description, and misplaced information and that is why I chose to write about this article and not necessarily the subject matter. If I were the editor and was paying someone to write this article, I would definitely expect a rewrite before it would be published.