(Note: These quotations are taken from our collection of nearly 400 published volumes of quotations and 1.5 million entries. If youre looking for some quotes on virtually any subject, send us an email at bob@kellygram.com, or call us at 480-895-7617. Or, if you have a quote topic youd like us to feature in an upcoming issue, email it to us and well get it on the schedule.)

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SPORTS JOURNALISM AT ITS BEST

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A brief item in the East Valley Tribune on Saturday, June 25 brought back some memories. It reported that the typewriter used by the late sports journalist Jim Murray to write more than 10,000 columns for the Los Angeles Times was sold at a recent Sothebys auction for $18,000, eliciting a comment from reporter Larry Stewart that the sale proves "that sometimes a thousand words is worth more than a picture."

Sports journalism has long been near and dear to my heart. During my growing up years, my dad was Sports Editor of the New York Times, and I longed to follow in his footsteps. I earned my first paycheck ($5) at age 15 for covering a high school football game for the Times. In college, I majored in journalism and reported on sports for my college newspaper.

After graduation and a two-year Army stint, I had two job offers: six nights a week, covering high school sports for a small suburban newspaper at $35 a week; or a nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday job with a Wall Street bank at $80 a week. I chose the latter "for a couple of years," which somehow stretched to 20. How I finally returned to my first love is a story well save for another day.

Meanwhile, back to Jim Murray, among the things I liked best about living in Southern California, which I did for 15 years, was the opportunity to read his column every morning in the sports section of the Los Angeles Times. He was a magnificent writer, often outrageous, provocative and hilarious, who described sports events and personalities as few, if any, ever have or could.

His journalism career spanned 55 years, the last 37 of them with the Times, where he won numerous awards and honors. The National Association of Sportscasters and Sportswriters named him "Americas Best Sportswriter" an unprecedented 14 times, and inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 1977. A Pulitzer Prize winner, he had the rare distinction, for someone with no direct connection to professional baseball, of being inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, New York in 1988.

Murray, who died in 1998, would undoubtedly bemoan what seems to be the trend in sports journalism today, consisting primarily in the endless recitation of a bewildering array of obscure and often meaningless statistics. When mixed in with poor grammar, as is often the case, the result is a thoroughly unpalatable mixture. Many of todays sports journalists would be wise to heed Murrays sound advice: "Learn to write. Never mind the damn statistics. If you like statistics, become a CPA."

One excellent way to learn how to write well would be to invest in a couple of the several books he wrote, which are available via the Internet.

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One very important perhaps the most important element in writing is readability. Ive focused on it in previous issues of The KellyGram, and emphasize it in the seminars and workshops I lead. However, a sentence in a recent magazine article I edited for a client made me realize its time to revisit the subject.

The sentence read: "The failure of the organization to address such a large part of peoples day-to-day lives is a major act of self-marginalization." Say what? Fortunately, the context in which that sentence was written gave me a hint of what the author was trying to say. What he meant was: "The organization often failed to address such a large part of peoples lives."

If you tend to use such obscure terms in your writing, help is available. Type in the word "readability" on Google or another search engine and youll find more than four million entries. One of our favorites is among the first 10 listed: http://juicystudio.com/services/readability.php. It describes three of the most popular methods for determining the readability of your writing, and includes a feature for calculating the readability of your website.

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An Amish boy and his father were visiting a mall. They were amazed by almost everything they saw, but especially by two shiny, silver walls that could move apart and back together again. The boy asked, "What is this, Father?"

The father (never having seen an elevator) responded, "Son, I have never seen anything like this in my life. I don't know what it is."

While they were watching wide-eyed, an old lady in a wheelchair rolled up to the moving walls and pressed a button. The walls opened and the lady rolled between them into a small room. The walls closed and the boy and his father watched as small circles of numbered lights above the walls began to light up.

As they continued to watch, the circles began lighting up in the reverse direction. The walls opened again and a beautiful 24-year-old woman stepped out.

After briefly contemplating this strange happening, the father said to his son, "Go get your mother."

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