Katie and I have been collecting writing samples: good, bad, and in between. This one, from Wednesday, is good:
At Thursday’s Presidential debate, Joe Biden and Donald Trump will face off in a historic rematch. These men, in addition to being the oldest major-party candidates in American history, are two singularly inarticulate politicians who struggle to formulate their thoughts clearly and who at times seem to have as adversarial a relationship to language as they do to each other. William Empson famously catalogued seven types of ambiguity; reading Trump’s and Biden’s debate transcripts from the last election cycle, one can identify at least four kinds of incoherence: vagueness, meandering/getting distracted, mixing up proper nouns, and overusing filler words. Both fall prey to the “tip of the tongue” phenomenon (tot), which occurs more frequently as people get older. In these situations, speakers cannot recall a word that is well known to them, but they can still ransack a vocabulary of ancillary words.
Catherine & Katharine 