Done right, context elevates understanding.
Done wrong, it distorts or confuses.
Place the example above in the confusion pile.
It’s from an AP story about two winners of the $587.5 million Powerball lottery.
The intent of the passage, presumably, was to describe the location of Dearborn, Mo., where the lucky winners live.
I haven’t decided whether the writer was overly familiar with Dearborn and figured that everyone knew where it was, or was clueless about Kansas City and decided that readers needed a reference to a nearby country to locate it.
Either way, it provided no help in finding Dearborn, which I’ve marked on the map below.
As you can see, I-29 does indeed connect Kansas City and the Canadian border. So the description was accurate. Accurate and helpful don’t necessarily go together, though.
I-29 also connects Kansas City and Fargo, Kansas City and Omaha, Kansas City and the Iowa border, Kansas City and St. Joseph, Kansas City and – you get the idea.
Other stories about the lottery winners did provide meaningful context.
NBC described Dearborn as a Kansas City suburb. ABC described it as being 30 miles north of Kansas City. USA Today provided – imagine this – a map.
CNN, on the other hand, didn’t bother to explain the location of Dearborn, other than saying it is in Missouri.
I guess that’s better than saying it is somewhere between Kansas City and Canada, which is helpful only if you expect the lottery winners to skip the country.
