i newspaper, December 22, 2017
(42 words) So often short pieces like this are shovelled through without any thought, yet with only a few minutes’ work they can be little gems. I guarantee that the Anniversaries feature has more readers than much of the heavy stuff.
There are several problems with these 42 words. If an animal (or person) is ‘born’, it is by definition a ‘baby’. It does not arrive with a name. The gorilla did not ‘become’ the first born in captivity, it ‘was’ the first. It is repetitive to use ‘born’ twice and ‘gorilla’ three times. The tense switches awkwardly from present to past. ‘Brought’ implies coming towards the writer, whereas ‘taken’ is neutral. I think this is better, since we are not in the US. And how about the fact that she died only this year, aged 60? Surely that’s worth a mention! NB In this case I think it is ok to talk about the animal as ‘she’, rather than ‘it’.
This is how I would do it:
Colo, the first gorilla born in captivity, made her entrance at Columbus Zoo in Ohio. Her parents were western lowland gorillas captured in French Cameroon and taken to the US in 1951. Colo died at the zoo in January this year aged 60. (43 words)