"I was also in love with the English language"
About this Quote
A journalist admitting he was "also in love with the English language" is letting the real affair slip: not just with stories, or with the people inside them, but with the instrument that makes them legible and lasting. The quiet punch is in "also". It suggests other loves already on the table - sports, characters, the chase, maybe the romanticized life of the reporter - yet the language is the enduring one, the relationship that outlives the assignment.
Dick Schaap came up in a midcentury American press culture that still prized voice: columnists who could sound like themselves, profiles that read like short stories, sportswriting that treated games as narrative and athletes as myth. In that context, "English" isn't a neutral medium; it's a craft, a competitive edge, a set of rhythms you train. Schaap's line frames writing as devotion, not duty. Love implies appetite: the pleasure of the well-turned sentence, the exact verb, the humane detail that keeps a subject from becoming copy.
The subtext is a defense of style at a time when journalism is always in danger of treating language as mere delivery system. Schaap is arguing, without preaching, that clarity and music are ethical tools. If you love the language, you respect readers enough to make meaning crisp, and you respect subjects enough to render them accurately. The sentence reads modest, even sentimental, but it's really a credo: journalism isn't just what you report; it's how you make it true in words.
Dick Schaap came up in a midcentury American press culture that still prized voice: columnists who could sound like themselves, profiles that read like short stories, sportswriting that treated games as narrative and athletes as myth. In that context, "English" isn't a neutral medium; it's a craft, a competitive edge, a set of rhythms you train. Schaap's line frames writing as devotion, not duty. Love implies appetite: the pleasure of the well-turned sentence, the exact verb, the humane detail that keeps a subject from becoming copy.
The subtext is a defense of style at a time when journalism is always in danger of treating language as mere delivery system. Schaap is arguing, without preaching, that clarity and music are ethical tools. If you love the language, you respect readers enough to make meaning crisp, and you respect subjects enough to render them accurately. The sentence reads modest, even sentimental, but it's really a credo: journalism isn't just what you report; it's how you make it true in words.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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