I really appreciate when you write in an order concerned more with depth and sequitur than with journalistic triage. As I'm sure you're well aware, journalists order their points based on the print newspaper design. Print newspapers have to arrange multiple headlines that take the reader to other pages--a physical obstacle that commands and homogenizes journalists' styles. This is why I like magazines like the Atlantic, where your style fits best. For instance, at about the halfway mark of this piece you write:
"When people like Jeffrey Clark receive a visit from the FBI or local law enforcement, they sometimes
complain that they are being treated like “a common criminal” instead of the upstanding citizens
they believe they are. [par.] When people hear that Breonna Taylor’s ex-boyfriend was wanted for drug offenses, she is often assumed to be complicit. That’s why the police went to her apartment in the middle of the night."
This encompasses your article. It's the spine. Its middle position fits it with strength rather than weakening it with "burial." In news work, especially TV news work, the Clark/Taylor contrast would probably be the first two paragraphs.
Where form meets substance is that your penetrating comparison would likely only activate an uninformed and polarizing argument among people who didn't want to read beyond their presuppositions about *how* the justice system is systemically biased. The way you work, the Clark/Taylor contrast) becomes a result of your argument's development, not a premise. Then a conclusion can become a new premise--hence the rest of the piece. This is how an argument goes vertical. It's what academia is supposed to accomplish for people (a gesture here to your writing about colleges as degree sellers rather than thought refineries).
Your comment about a gun's role in a bar fight fits here. Shallow consideration and baiting to offense seems to have only one vertical element: escalation.
I really appreciate when you write in an order concerned more with depth and sequitur than with journalistic triage. As I'm sure you're well aware, journalists order their points based on the print newspaper design. Print newspapers have to arrange multiple headlines that take the reader to other pages--a physical obstacle that commands and homogenizes journalists' styles. This is why I like magazines like the Atlantic, where your style fits best. For instance, at about the halfway mark of this piece you write:
"When people like Jeffrey Clark receive a visit from the FBI or local law enforcement, they sometimes
complain that they are being treated like “a common criminal” instead of the upstanding citizens
they believe they are. [par.] When people hear that Breonna Taylor’s ex-boyfriend was wanted for drug offenses, she is often assumed to be complicit. That’s why the police went to her apartment in the middle of the night."
This encompasses your article. It's the spine. Its middle position fits it with strength rather than weakening it with "burial." In news work, especially TV news work, the Clark/Taylor contrast would probably be the first two paragraphs.
Where form meets substance is that your penetrating comparison would likely only activate an uninformed and polarizing argument among people who didn't want to read beyond their presuppositions about *how* the justice system is systemically biased. The way you work, the Clark/Taylor contrast) becomes a result of your argument's development, not a premise. Then a conclusion can become a new premise--hence the rest of the piece. This is how an argument goes vertical. It's what academia is supposed to accomplish for people (a gesture here to your writing about colleges as degree sellers rather than thought refineries).
Your comment about a gun's role in a bar fight fits here. Shallow consideration and baiting to offense seems to have only one vertical element: escalation.