Pipe Bursts, Floods Dorm

This article was found on the front page of the Alligator, volume 103, issue 35.

October 13, 2009

The author of this article, Rebeca Martinez, chose an interesting source to rely upon for an eyewitness account of the recent flooding of Riker Hall on Saturday. Unfortunately, the whole first portion of the article, the part encompassing a large chunk of the front page of the paper, depends on the report of one Uri Ramirez, a UF sophomore who lives on the third floor of the flooded building. In large bold letters usually reserved for supplying the reader with a summary of the article's important content, Martinez displays Ramirez's rather precocious comment: "It was pretty loud actually. And my hypothesis is that they hit one of the sprinklers, and suddenly, I heard a splash of water." Since Ramirez himself isn't able to write out his statement for Martinez to use, I believe it is up to the author in displaying the quote with the most readable use of grammar. I an not suggesting that Martinez should change the statement in any way, but just make sure that proper sentence structure be used to present the article in the most professional light that is easy for the reader to understand. Instead, the quote could be written as: "It was pretty loud actually; and my hypothesis is that they hit one of the sprinklers," and use the second part of the quote--"and suddenly, I heard a splash"-- in another part of the article; perhaps when using Ramirez's second quote where he describes how he heard a couple of guys playing with what sounded like a nerf ball outside his window. This would make more chronological sense, so there would be an ease in the flow of the article, for the reader's sake. Continuing on the eighth page of the paper, the article uses another witness' statements, Josh Perry. The author makes the mistake of using a third party quote, which isn't very professional since there is a questioning of reliability. "From what I heard" is how the quote begins. The article then begins to rely exclusively on what "Perry said", as most of the concluding paragraphs end in or include the phrase "Perry said". If a writer is going to depend so heavily on witness' statements, it needs to find more than two contributors.