FIRE, LIKE A TORCH, GET IT!?

With the return to school and the start of a new semester, so too begins another cycle of work for the school newspaper, where I'm like, the top women's sports writer ever. I enjoy my work, I spent most of last semester following the Women's soccer team, before shifting over to the Men's team to cover their victory in the Big East tournament and their foray into the NCAA championships; This semester I'm getting some time in following the prime sport on campus, Basketball.

Also, now starts my eternal displeasure with the editing done upon my work. I like my editor, Stephen, it'd be impossible not to, the guy is the freaking man. But sometimes his changes and edits puzzle me, really just leave me without a clue. I have an annoying habit of working from the department of redundancy department on occassion, and when it's 4:30am and I'm burning the midnight oil, I sometimes slip up and let it by, and he has always caught those kind of things for me, and for that I am thankful; It would certainly be beneficial if I could get him to review the occasional homework assignment I do for my girlfriend, when my eyes are just way too tired to proofread, and I make silly errors. Sorry about that baby, the United States of the United States of America would seem a bit blatant.

I even understand his tendency to remove, or tone down, my horribly broken analogies. I enjoy delving deeply into a horribly flawed and half baked analogy, trying to make it work despite all evidence pointing to the contrary. I take it as a challenge!! But somewhere I can rationalize that they cannot print a three paragraph tangent depicting how Aliens is an allegory for Vietnam, and I accept it. Especially when the article is supposed to be about softball. I think in this article I had three more references to the Women's basketball team starting a fire in the midst of a cold winter, and they were removed, and the story does not suffer, it may even benefit. I won't whine!

BUT WHY, OH WHY, ARE ALL OF THE SEMI-COLONS CHANGED TO PERIODS!? I don't use a lot of short, simple sentences, they are a weapon with a time and a place, used for effect. I understand that Mr Scanlon once returned a paper to me that counted 156 commas on the front of a piece of loose leaf, and that there needed to be a change. That was two commas too many. And I understand that Professor La Monica returned a paper to me that had a three sentence lede made up of 400 words, and he used a couple of simple sentences to convey how he felt about it: He said "Stop this or fail. You are a dumbass." And I got the point. But to reduce me to a bunch of five word sentences in a row? Listen I've been rendered speechless once in my life; I've lost my voice many times, due to excessive talking/rocking out, but that doesn't count. To actually be rendered unable to form a relatively coherant sentence has happened only one time, and it's not something I'll recount here, Melissa knows why.

But I don't like this perversion of my diatribe. It's not me. Give me literary meandering, or give me death! I beat upon the skulls of my potential readers with huge hammers of text, it is just my way. Leave me to my methods! And maybe someday let me write my own headlines. Maybe.

Anyway, here's the article. Kill me now.

http://media.www.torchonline.com/media/storage/paper952/news/2007/01/17/Sports/Prevailing-2651193.shtml?sourcedomain=www.torchonline.com&MIIHost=media.collegepublisher.com