From The Anniston Star of 12/19/2020. Click the link to see the letter.
You are seeing this title again because this was a simultaneous submission to both AL.com and The Anniston Star (the Star editor knew that it would appear first in AL.com).
Note the significant differences between this and the AL.com version. The Star version allows me to deliver on my earlier promise to whine about editing. I do understand the need to edit for length, especially in a print publication. The Star has a 200-word limit for letters to the editor, but allows up to 500 words for a column. My submission was over 300 words. Rather than run it as a column, they cut it down and put it in the letters section. While I enjoy seeing anything of mine in print (egomaniac that I am) it is painful to see what winds up on the cutting-room floor. In this case it was the pronunciation guide to the word “chutzpah.” This stabs me in the heart, because I like to have a joke in every 2nd or 3rd sentence, at least. They also shortened my paragraph about Nick Saban enjoying a Trump-less Auburn team. In shortening a phrase about Auburn being in rebuilding mode, they introduced a typo (“ebuilding”). They changed other phrases too, subtracting humor points at every turn for the sake of length. As is their right.
And look what they did with the title. My submitted title (Make Auburn Great Again) was intended to twang the MAGA string in the readers’ minds. That shock of recognition would lead them to at least start to read the article, since I know some folks skim headlines and only read the ones that spark an interest. Once tweaked/twanged/sparked to enter my lair, they would tread along the setup in the first sentence and then get smacked in the face with the “hire Trump” joke, and then I would have my way with them (in a literary sense) for a few more paragraphs. But the editor-supplied extension of my headline leads with the punchline and simply hits people in the foot with a sledgehammer. It would be like advertising an appearance by Rodney Dangerfield by writing “Dangerfield tonight - he will say ‘take my wife please’”. CLONG. Ow, my foot. So much for timing.
Well! I feel much better now.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.