It's close to bedtime, and tomorrow I'm going out of town for a week, but today I noticed a certain sentence in the newspaper, and I have to get it off my chest.

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Kansas City is one of the world's great art museums. It has a new wing called the Bloch Building. It's planning further renovation so can better display its Native American art. In an attempt to squeeze as much news as possible into one sentence, a reporter wrote this:

The plan calls for reusing space vacated on the second floor when the new Bloch Building opened by creating a spacious, 6,200-square-foot gallery for a collection currently housed in less than 1,000 square feet on the third floor.
=====
Recently I was on a thread where we talked about writing technical reports for Chinese clients. My husband and I figured out that since Chinese script is based on pictures, that he should try to use concrete language as much as possible.

Take a look at the above sentence and ask yourself how you could write it using pictures.

How many sentences are buried within it?

plan calls
reuse space
space was vacated
Bloch Building opened
create a gallery
collection is housed

Now I see that the answer is 6.

When I hear about recalls and flaws in products from China, I wonder how much of the problem is caused by writing such as this..

And why is it that P.G. Wodehouse could braid four or five sentences into one and create a little work of art, while other people try it and create a clunker? (Good question for a college class in English.)

See ya next week.