I read and reviewed Ronda Rousey's memoir

[oats]

http://www.sherdog.com/news/articles...ur-Fight-86339


Lmk what you guys think.

[Diode]

"Yet, the pains of her adolescence play an aortic role in the book. "

Stop. Don't do that.

[Diode]

"The future Olympic judoka had no easy paths to the top, overcoming an early-childhood speech impediment, an insecurity-driven eating disorder and the heartbreaking losses inside and out of competition, the most emotionally resonant of which being the decline of her father’s health that culminated in his shocking, tragic death."

this sentence needs a lot of help.

i'm not trying to be a dick. i like the general tone of your writing. there are some seriously questionable word choices and sentence structure issues, however.

[Split Eight]

Replace "of which" with "of these" and I think it's technically fine.

I'd also throw in a hyphen after 'competition'

[Inno]

Lol oats did expect to be corrected?

[oats]

changing it to "of these" would not make it better lol, and there is nothing wrong with that sentence grammatically or rhythmically tbh. The better fix would be to cut out "of which" altogether and skip to "...being the shocking, tragic death of her father." Had I drafted it a bit more that's what I would change, but alas, time is of the essence, and I'd prefer my second-rate words published to my first-rate ones unpublished. The original sentence untouched by my editor:

The future Olympic judoka had no easy paths to the top, overcoming an early-childhood speech impediment, an insecurity-driven eating disorder, and the heartbreaking losses inside and out of competition - the most emotionally resonant of which being the decline of her father’s health that culminated in his shocking, tragic death.

word choice is a matter of taste, and I tend to read prose and fiction more than journalism. not saying my writing style is beyond reproach - I constantly see things I would revise, and have changed many points of phrasing because of NCG input - but I've been in years of workshops and worked with enough people to distinguish valid criticism from stylistic nitpicking. People don't like too many clauses/get intimidated by the idea of overusing commas, but to me the chain-wrestling of grammar is a fun challenge.

aortic may be heavy-handed, but it was the word that came to mind and I went with it. not tripping about it. @Diode what are your opinions on Rousey in general?