Thursday, January 5, 2012

And Then CBS News...

In reading a CBS News article about a 15-year-old boy who brought a gun to school and was then shot by police, I was distracted by the following paragraph:

"He said he last saw his son around 6:30 a.m. Wednesday, when the boy said goodbye before leaving to catch the bus to school. And he said nothing seemed amiss the night before when he, his wife and their son went out for nachos then went home and watched a movie."

That second sentence which starts with And was very clunky to me. I'm all for starting a sentence with a coordinating conjunction when the time is right. This just wasn't one of those times. I had to read it twice before it made sense. Here's my revision, which eliminates the conjunction, changes a phrase, and adds a comma:

He said nothing seemed amiss the previous night when he, his wife, and their son went out for nachos, then went home and watched a movie.

Do you like my sentence better?

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