Fri, 26 Sep 2025 09:33:32 EDT
Consider This Sentence
The following sentence occurs in The Wall Street Journal on Apple News. “A federal grand jury in Virginia indicted former FBI director James Comey on Thursday on charges of making false statements and obstruction, days after President Trump demanded the prosecution and ousted the U.S. attorney who determined there was insufficient evidence to bring the case.”
As I have said before, I believe that certain newspaper’s databases are indexed on summary sentences, and this favors crammed summary sentences.
I assume that the WSJ style guide demands periods with U.S. but not with FBI. Why?
From NBC News, I have learned that obstruction is a shortened obstruction of a congressional proceeding. I suspect that the phrase was collapsed to reduce the length of the sentence, but the lone word obstruction is insufficient to communicate the charge.
Bring the case where? Bring the case forward or bring the case to court is better.
It is always less clumsy to lead with a time or place sentence adverb than to bury it later in the sentence. Making the first word in the sentence the subject does not automatically increase lucidity.
My rewrite: “On Thursday, a federal grand jury indicted former FBI director James Comey for making false statements and for obstructing a congressional proceeding. The indictment follows President Trump’s demand for Comey’s prosecution and the president’s termination of a US attorney who failed to find evidence of wrongdoing.”