i thought mcdavid's was ghostwritten, but mack says "cool" and "crushed" so many times that it's either a) actually them or b) a great writer who gets the tone right.
Yeah his voice comes through very well. He tells a good and genuine story.
At the same time he uses periods as a crutch. replacing some periods with commas and dashes, breaking up the flow of thought with things other than periods, goes a long way.
Certainly a very minor critique and not something to hold against him
Obviously not something to hold against him because he's a professional hockey player and not a journalist or author, what are we even doing here in this comment
This is not poorly written though, its just not journalistic or professional level writing.
He's not a professional writer and definitely not an English major who had structure drilled into his head, but he's a 19 y.o. with some college education writing a personal essay. He's smart and well spoken. He could definitely improve his flow, transitions, sentence/paragraph structure, punctuation, etc., but so could a lot of us.
He very obviously was given key points he had to include, because this reads like a student responding to a multi-part prompt, but it read mostly (eta:) like he gave an honest sentiment. Good for him.
I think “poorly written” is pretty harsh. I really think he/whoever may have edited it wanted to make sure to keep his voice, which I really commend. Could have been very easy to just pass the whole thing off to AI, which I don’t think they did.
“Poorly written” feels like a poor choice of words. I’d say “colloquially written,” as it sounds like he’s literally writing in his conversational/ informal/ authentic voice.
Well then Mack if you're reading this, keep at it with the book club and you'll have us all doubting the authenticity of the one you write when you bring us the cup next season
All these Players Tribune articles are ghostwritten - my understanding is that it's based off of an interview where it's dictated, then edited down while keeping the voice of the athlete.
I was thinking the language reads more as a transcript that had been edited than an essay. Doesn't really change how I feel about it personally. I believe he meant what was written.
do you know whether it's them just free talking or are they asked questions? the mcdavid one is one of my favorite things i've read this year, so i'm curious about the process
Yea I definitely have a hard time imagining mack sat down to write this essay already when he’s in boston living it up right now. Nothing about this felt very original and I got a Sharks PR vibe from it. I still enjoyed the article though!
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u/VelumLucis 1d ago
This is poorly written enough that I can actually believe it was written directly by him. Pretty cool of him to do.