Pulled Quotes

Paul Prudhomme was apparently hit by a bullet last Tuesday according to the USA Today article “Chef Paul Prudhomme grazzed by a bullet.”  The shot which apparently was fired from a “1 1/2 mile radius” of the golf course Prudomme was at, presumably was not intended to hurt the top chef.

However, little is known of where the bullet came from, who fired it and what police are doing to investigate the situation further. The article also fails to mention how the chef felt after receiving the unexpected blow. Although Prudhomme apparently did not need any medical attention, as the bullet merely cut his skin and made a hole in his cooking attire, one must assume the bullet was meant for an alternative target.

The article does state that the chef just continued cooking with little care of what had just happened. The event is one that seems somewhat puzzling and rather random. One lesson learned from this is be careful when cooking outdoors who knows what might happen!

A USA Today article is about a glacier the size of Connecticut breaking away.  The lead ends with this quote, “putting an even greater portion of glacial ice at risk”, however that is not followed at all in the story. 

I would like to know the risk, to glaciers and to me.  The first article that was released barely held any information.  Now, the articles are more in depth.  Is this going to cause a ripple effect that eventually causes a tidal wave?  Are a lot of animals going to die? 

The first article did not answer my tidal wave question, it was only about 5 paragraphs.  However, the USA Today article did state that their was no threat to water levels.  I think the lead should have focused on the photos that we were able to take and how long this glacier has been breaking away, after all that is what the story focuses on. 

The lead is somewhat sensational, and I guess supposed to worry people.  However, the story does not talk about that at all.  This is the problem I have with writing.  The writer needs to find out what the actual news is and stick with it.

In USA Today there was an article in on page 3D called “Planets collide in all-black ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ revival”. It was about a play that recently got revived o Broadway. I thought that the article was really well written, however, I thought it was somewhat unusual because it did not follow the structure of a regular news story that you would see in a newspaper like USA Today. I honestly think that the article would have fit better as a opinion article, not as just a regular news story in the Arts section. One reason I thought this was because the writer criticized and praised the acting of the characters in the show. For instance the writer said this about one of the actresses in the play, “…but its another case of a normally astute, elegant actress adding too much sauce to an already spicy part” I think that this quote right here shows the writer being biased, making it sound more like an opinion article than a regular news story. Also the writer used a lot of descriptive speaking which is odd for a regular news story, you would see descriptive speaking more in a magazine story than in a news story in a newspaper, especially since I personally think that descriptive speaking makes the article seem more opinionated. Also, the ending of the article sounded like a conclusion to a story, tying the entire piece together, whereas regular news stories don’t tend to do that.   On the other hand, I thought that the article was very informational and provided readers will a good background on the show and the characters of the show. I did not really have many questions about the show because the writer provided a lot of information in a short and efficient way. The only questions I had were, what is Big Daddy prosperity? Who is Tennessee Williams? And was the show written about Tennessee William’s son? Was it a play written on someone’s real life, or in other words, was it factual, a true story? While these questions may have not been newsworthy enough for the article, I think that it would still be interesting to know the answer to these questions after reading this article.