Last Updated on August 22, 2017
In the article about the news anchor who had to apologize for remarks about Santa Claus, there was this interesting line:
“Yes, Fox Chicago’s Robin Robinson knee deep in the reindeer stables this week after a Tuesday night segment on whether or not, in this economic climate, mall Santas should try to downplay kids’ expectations.”
Go back and read the sentence again slowly, word by word.  I hope you notice that something is missing from that sentence.
This is a perfect example of one of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to broadcast news writing.
I’m a journalism major. No professor I ever had, no textbook I ever used, urged students to drop helping verbs. Yet I hear it from broadcasters all the time.
If we rewrite the sentence so that it actually is a sentence, it might look like this:
“Yes, Fox Chicago’s Robin Robinson was knee deep in the reindeer stables this week after a Tuesday night segment on whether or not, in this economic climate, mall Santas should try to downplay kids’ expectations.”
A lot of people seem to think that verbs like was sound too passive. But you don’t fix that by just dropping them out of the sentence. The writer could have said that the anchor found herself knee deep in the reindeer stables this week.
Or that the anchor stumbled into a knee-deep mess in the reindeer stables.
It’s bad enough when you hear it on television.
It’s glaring when you read it in print.
There are valid times when you can break rules of grammar for effect. Dropping helping verbs just because you think it sounds less passive is never a valid reason.
I wish more of my colleagues could see that.
