If you know me, you know English is my forte. When I read a publication like a newspaper, magazine, or whatever riddled with mistakes I get frustrated and mull over the mistakes. I’ve been known to contact the publisher even. I could easily make it as an editor or writer if I wanted but it’s not. Yes, saying that makes me seem conceited but I’m not. I can easily prove it. Backstory aside, I recently came across this article Google’s gourmet embarrassed on ‘Top Chef’ while randomly surfing the net and after reading it, felt Twilight’d. For those of you who don’t know what Twilight’d means, I shall use an anecdote and the next paragraph to explain.
<rant>I saw Twilight full price ($7.50) at the theater because the trailers made it look like it’d be worth watching. It wasn’t. I haven’t seen a movie worse than Twilight. I take that back since I’ve seen Superman Returns, or at least the parts I didn’t fall asleep for. It was full of bad dialogue, sub-par acting by some, and was exceedingly slow and boring. It was like observing the most awkward highers on their most awkward of dates. Needless to say, I felt cheated, misled, and I wanted a 100% refund on my money. Since then I refer being mislead, subjected to corniness, subjected to a waste of money/time, or made to watch a bad performance as being Twilight’d.</rant>
I read the CNet article and was dumbfounded by the flamboyance of the writers’s… “style” for lack of a more truthful term. I’ll provide a few examples of times where the author, Chris Matyszczyk, turns what could have been an informative post into a worthless menagerie of complex and overly descriptive words. The entire article, written by Chris Matyszczyk, is, for lack of a better word, a travesty. Sure it’s nice to be as descriptive and pack as much information as you can into some things such as text messages, movies, novels and the likes but not a news article. Yes, I’m guilty of doing it sometimes myself. I don’t write the and I don’t do it often though. Because I’m writing an opinion and not news, the style of writing I’m critiquing works in my case. I’ve selected a few examples since the entire article (sans the ending) is pretty much word fluff to show what I mean.

“You see, the judges, led by the bald, lip-twitching Tom Colicchio (he of New York’s Craft restaurant), weren’t merely upset that she had prepared something that a bankrupt British public school might offer its pupils during a power outage.
They were distraught that, even when challenged, she thought the dish was good.”

Really? How much more dramatic and overly informative could you be? The first sentence defies the preset tone of the article and is a poorly formed sentence fragment. If you had to be that dramatic in a printed news article, the sentences would’ve been better worded as:
The judges, led by Tom Colicchio of New York’s Craft Restaurant, were upset. Their distress ensued after when challenged she thought the dish- something worthy of lunch at a bankrupt British public after a power outage- was good.
It’s equally dramatic and slightly more realistic. Nobody gets distraught over a dish that turns out poorly unless they’ve made or paid for it.
Moving on,

“When all around her blanched at the blandness, Mistry was unbowed. So for her stubborn myopia, she had to hear the words that lead so many young chefs to tears, recriminations, Xanax and a job at the Outback Steakhouse: ‘Please pack your knives and go.’”

Wow. After reading this you should see what I mean. Right now I’m reminded of several singers/rappers (mainly Kanye West) saying and rhyming things just for the sake of dramatics without any thought into their meaning or lack thereof and Sarah Palin on the campaign trail. At least the rappers/singers eventually got somewhere with their message or got to one, which is more than a lot say for Mrs. Pain. If you’re reading the news, you don’t want to see something like this that causes you to reread the lines a few times to get the meaning. There’s some play on cooking related words here but it’s not enough to overpower the “WTF’s he saying”, tongue-twisterish feeling you get after you first read it. Honestly, it reads like something out of a romance novel about a lover being scorned.
Onward to further travesties.

Mistry’s reactions lay somewhere between blase and Buddhist. But she had already proved that she was incapable of shucking clams. Now here she was shirking criticism.

Given his propensity for topical insertions of culture references, I’m surprised there’s no better less ambiguous description of her reaction. There would have been the perfect time to insert a reference to some British celebrity known for being lax and dodging criticisms about their field.

You should now see my point. The author has managed to turn an egg’s amount of information into a quiche of a news article which the editor’s should’ve flambéd. Cooking puns aside, the author has managed to make a headline ticker on you local news program into a 9 o’clock expose. Among other things, it’s poor writing like that that makes me not pay attention to the news or certain news sources like the Iowa State Daily.