![]() ![]() Is it the cold robotic precision of a classic boxscore copywriter? The sarcastic, smug bile of the blurbist who thinks he should be the manager? The analytics-obsessed savant whose prose reveals the writer has never shaken his hips at an 80’s dance party? Next week we will dive deeper into style and what makes the perfect blurb. We now know the limits of the modern blurbist: 90 words per section of analysis. Just an arbitrary UI word count threshold. I clicked and it ended the sentence very plainly. Would it take me to another page? Is this clickbait? Would it vault me over the paywall to join the fantasy baseball country club elite? Is there a dress code? Do I own any penny loafers? Did I even want to read more in the first place? Ninety words into this blurb, the final clause became obscured by bold letters that said: SEE MORE…. ![]() So it goes that today I clicked a blurb on Rotoworld (NBCsportsedge, ahem) and noticed an incomplete blurb. As I’ve been trying to analyze both how to avoid being stomped by errant blurbs, or even how I have been stomped on in the past, I have remarked that blurbs are trying too hard they’re trying to become play-by-play announcers, full team box scores, and even wikipedia rap sheet pages. ![]() Did we learn nothing from Project Runway? Style? Style is nothing without substance. I conceived and wrote the first column in one go, as my wife lamented the title in the margins. I write the way I write for reasons I can’t explain, and because I’m lucky that Grey, Rudy, Blair, Donkey, and others answered my email last year and asked for a writing sample. The style is simplistically impenetrable, and yet alluring and mystical. An untrained Beefheart recorded improvised piano pieces that Drumbo was asked to turn into written music for two guitars, a bass, and drums. My own writing style can be best described as Captain Beefheart’s signature backwards drums, as evidenced by John French, aka, Drumbo. It’s one thing to giggle at the classic, “Do as I say, not as I do.” It’s another thing entirely to throw rocks at a glass house, especially when my glass house follows the architectural logic of the Winchester mystery mansion. Meanwhile, I find myself flummoxed when facing and critiquing wordy blurbs, as I preach brevity on a pedestal hewn from my own satirically tangled diction. Those dudes would post grammar rules every day and get roasted. “Gadzooks,” they might say, “I am agog at the critique I posted this evening!” they might say. They surely must have a Strunk & White guide of their own. In a medium whose format champions concision, I assume blurb writers follow a style mandate: Say as much as one can, in the fewest words possible.
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