Who Dat Say They Gonna Read Them Pathfinders Critique

Pathfinder issue of Jan. 27:

THE GOOD:

- Front page had a pair of informative looks at campus news: the fledgling dental hygiene program at LCSC and the relocated outdoor program.

- Page 2's opinion pieces are consistently the most enjoyable to read. Amy and Jed's commentaries are always fun, and Kasi has churned out another highly entertaining column, this one about her quest for a pickled cure-all.



- Katy's effusive endorsement of "Avatar" almost makes me want to shell out the $350 it would cost to take my family of four to it in the theater. Almost. Think I'll wait for it to come to the dollar theater, where I'll smuggle in store-bought candy. Hope I like it as much as she did.

- Alex's trip down Mastication Memory Lane — visiting Rowdy's Texas Steakhouse — was a winner. I think she should do a blog where she could post all her reviews, past and future, to the Internet. Totally serious. I'd go there; wouldn't you?

- The Student Health column by newcomer Lindsey Smith is an excellent new feature, sure to appeal to a wide variety of readers. Maybe that's why I couldn't find any copies of this issue in the library or administration building. Super topic and fine writing. More, please.

- Robby distilled the latest musical effort by the Decemberists.

- Jed's "Sports Shorts" commentary is like, well, it's like finding a uneaten breath mint in your wife's pants pocket when doing laundry. It's exactly like that.

- Word on the Street is an enlightening feature, even when the humans queried aren't the sharpest tools in the Warrior shed (mainly because they don't read the Pathfinder cover to cover as they should).

THE NOT-SO-GOOD:

- The dental hygiene story needed a sharper focus: Was it about the five students currently in the program (whose names I still don't know) or was it about the availability of low-cost dental care available to LCSC students? I vote the latter.

- News stories should always strive be objective, written in the third-person narrative. The outdoors program story's lead uses the word "ours" to refer to the campus. This word signals the reader that the writer may be injecting some of his or her opinion into the piece. While that turns out to not be the case, let's try to develop a detachment in our news writing.

- Ellipses should be a rarity in newspapers. They are mainly used in quotes to indicate that the speaker said something else that wasn't germane to the rest of the quote. They were popping up like spring weeds in this issue. Use a period (full stop to you Britons out there). Write short snappy sentences. Make your adviser happy.

- Got some number problems in the jump of the dental hygiene story. The rule here is: Numbers between one and nine, spell out; 10 and above use numerals. There are exceptions; consult the AP Stylebook to discern them. Just know that, in journalism, we write "$40" not "forty dollars."

- The column width of the jazz band story on Page 5 is way too wide. The ideal width of a column of type (arrived at through painstaking research) is 12 picas. The rule of thumb is to stay between 10 and 20 picas wide for your columns.

- Nuke that house ad at the bottom of Page 6 and you can get the entire movie review on the same page without having to jump it three pages and make the reader go hunt for it.

STUFF TO WORK ON:

- Times of day are written like this: 9 a.m. , 3 p.m. , 12:45 a.m., noon, midnight.

- Don't use the pound symbol (#); write it as No. 14

- It's Vicks VapoRub, a brand name, as per Kasi's column.

- Ads should start at the bottom of a page and work their way up, to distinguish them from the editorial content, which moves in the opposite direction.

- In headlines, it's single quotes. Always. Unless there's a quote within the quote, which is rare. Just do single quotes in headlines. I'm begging you here.

- Again, dates within a week of publication, either forward or backward, are referred to as the day, not the date. In other words, the headline on Page 9 should have read: LCSC's Goodan to read poetry on Friday.

- Exclamation marks should be a once-in-a-blue-moon occurrence in journalistic writing. When I see three of them, as per Jed's "Sports Shorts," it almost causes me to stroke out. Please, by all that's holy, use exclamation points with discretion.