Authors say the darnedest things (?)

The Sandbox General
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J.A. Jance (a mystery write whom I enjoy) wrote this on her facebook page

To me, the two "first"s make no sense together. My wife thinks it’s fine, that Jance is saying, perfectly clearly, that she watched a complete game for the first time since she did it in 1958. I can accept that she might mean that, but I still don’t see how she is saying that. What think you?

(I like JA Jance’s books, but I had never visited her facebook page. That post just showed up in my news feed.)

New thread since it’s not Political, and I do not know if she’s a Republican or Democrat.

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it isn’t about understanding the sentence, it is about flow, and ease of reading. Reading Steinbeck currently, love the word usage. Creating an image.

Replace “my first” with “a”

i agree, i needed to look at it almost like a double negative, did it mean something other than i initially read

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I understood it just fine, but PZ’s fix is also what I thought of to make it clearer.

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:iatp:

It’s not confusing. It’s clunky.

Not what you’d like to see from an author, but it’s a social media post.

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i missed it was FB.

no editor for social media. Sometimes you start to say one thing. change your thought and don’t start from scratch, but awkwardly edit.

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:iatp:
There’s more leeway for clunky writing in a FB post, imo…but it did seem to come from a committee meeting of the Department of Redundancy Dept.

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Professional authors work with professional editors.

I’m often redundantly redundant in first draft.

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