Sad to hear of the death of John Gray, former Globe and Mail foreign correspondent and political reporter, three times NNA winner.
He was also a super nice man. https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/theglobeandmail/obituary.aspx?n=john-anthony-morgan-gray&pid=196848789

John had a way with words. I remember John describing how Lucien Bouchard wavered at Mulroney's calls for him to enter politics in the 1980s. John wrote that "Mr. Bouchard was suspended somewhere between independence and indifference."

The night of the 1995 Quebec referendum, I was working with John and Rhéal Séguin, in the Palais des congrès, covering the Yes side. Because of the late hours, we all had staggered deadlines for our respective articles...

As the evening went on, I am sweating over my copy while John is just sitting there, calmly taking in the atmosphere, utterly cool. What a professional, I thought. Finally, with maybe 15-20 minutes to his deadline, I pointed at my watch and asked why he wasn't writing...

His face just dropped. He had misunderstood the memo with the deadlines! His hands started flying over the keyboard. Still, the story he produced on such tight conditions has nice touches.

His story also had this paragraph, which correctly anticipated the mood in the following months in Quebec, a tense, rancorous time, the memory of which still keeps many from revisiting the constitutional/sovereignty issue.

Did you notice the alliterations and the way the main section of that sentence (after the first subordinate clause) has a pleasant pace by having three parts? I would have needed to write and rewrite to achieve that. He did it on the tightest of deadlines.

Now I am looking again at the bits I posted and I see that John did it elsewhere too, this three-part structuring. In the 1st excerpt, he wrote "Until then, they had been yelling, screaming and chanting because victory for Quebec independence looked overwhelming."

Yelling and screaming are synonymous but he used both to create rhythm. "Until then, they had been screaming and chanting because victory for Quebec independence looked overwhelming" doesn't have the same cadence. And he did it on deadline.

If you pay attention you start seeing the 3 parts everywhere. Two is too short and choppy, four is too long. Three feels just right to create a tempo. Here are two famous examples -- and I am not saying John and I are anywhere close to that level, it just shows how common it is.

"(1)We few, (2) we happy few, (3) we band of brothers."

"(1) II est des parfums frais comme des chairs d'enfants,
(2) Doux comme les hautbois, (3) verts comme les prairies"