Hadjare sat at her beat up, old Office Max desk that Tim had bought her for her 23rd birthday. She joked that it was really the red necks equivalent of a state-of-the-art surround sound system for pick up truck. Days after the desk was assembled, a computer founds its way to roost on top, with Tim as it's perpetual companion.
"Man," she thought staring at the screen, "I have nothing to write about." A sinus headache, only slightly dulled with generic tylenol, drained her creative energies. Minutes dragged by as she debated whether or not it was appropriate to put quotes around thoughts, and a dog squeezed a squeaky toy in the background. From the living room plants, buttons, books, and people screamed as they were picked up by a large, sticky rolling ball. Hours earlier she had played the same game herself rolling over chickens, boxes, cows and eventually buildings, boats, light houses, whales and sea monsters. It had been two days since she beat the game and yet she still couldn't get enough of rolling over crap.
"Whoever thought of Katamari Damacy is a freaking genius," she whispered as she typed. She stared a moment longer and then decided she would include a Week in Pictures in her small publication to make up for the lousy article. "Tomorrow," she stated and turned off the computer for the night.
posted by hadjare @ 8:35 PM
3 Comments:
looking forward to the week in pictures hadjare was going to post yesterday...*cough*
i tried posting this the other day but there was some lag and i couldn't get this window to open up... it's a reply to your question about quotes and obituaries.
in general, there are two types of obits. the most common are the kind that funeral homes put together and submit to the newspapers, usually with very little or no input from the family aside from the list of relatives survived by. as you might expect, there are in most cases not examples of really fine writing - it's essentially a form in quasi-narrative style. these are the places where you tend to see quotations where no one is actually being quoted or all kinds of other goofy journalism no-no's that most papers just shut up and deal with, since the obits are usually considered an extra long classified ad.
the other kind of obituary are the ones where a reporter is actually assigned or choses to do a story about a person who recently died. this is usually either because the dead person was famous or locally noteworthy [the stories about the death of ronald reagan or the local sheriff who held office for 27 years would fall into this category]; the victim of some kind of heinous or noteworthy tragedy [a local teenager killed on graduation weekend or the New York Times doing a write up on every single person who died in the trade towers on Sept 11] or; the reporter finds some sort of unique special interest in the person or events that lead to their death - or someone pitches the newspaper an idea on those grounds and it's a slow enough day that someone takes them up on the idea. there was an obit in one of the milwaukee or madison paper a couple years ago that was prompted by an old woman who wanted a reference to george bush as a son of a bitch in her obit - the paper was initially not going to print a cussword in the newspaper but, after a long editorial argument, finally caved on the grounds that it was a paid advertisement. and so one of the reporters wrote i think two stories about it - one about the paper struggling with the decision and the other talking to her family, trying to find out more about why she was such a colorful old woman.
in these second type of obituaries, it's very common to find quotations, just like in any regular news story done by a reporter - but they'll follow the accepted journalism practices, unlike the funeral home ones, which are written by people who don't know what they're doing when it comes to writing.
all you would have needed to do to make those quotations "correct" would have been to insert a comma or two and attribute them to someone - which is usually the mistake the funeral homes make; they don't attribute the quotation to someone but then it isn't a quote anymore, it's just a pithy comment with no context.
all of which is almost certainly more than you wanted to know. but i'm winding down from essay questions and reports from finals week and so this is what you get.
I like Phil's comment.
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