Brad,
   I am absolutely baffled why you believe "It was like the revival of an
old melodrama that I had seen long ago with childish awe" is not
correct.
   The other point I would like to make is that people (I suspect Obama
also, though you don't give any examples) don't put "had" in front of
past tense verbs. "Had" is followed by past participle, which is
identical with the past tense form for all regular verbs. >
   "He walked through fields he had walked as a child" is perfectly well
formed. If you are correcting verb phrases like that, then you are
deeply mistaken.
   I think writing teachers, like doctors, should "first do no harm."

Craig

If you like, “It was like the revival of an old melodrama that I had seen
> long ago with childish awe.”
>   ... better than, “It was like the revival of an old melodrama that I saw
> long ago with childish awe.”
>
>   ... who is to quarrel? (De gustibus and all that.)
>
>   It is, however, probably preferable to teach it correctly and then let
> the student appreciate whatever he appreciates later on, bad grammar and
> all.
>
>   (I'll have to look it up. Do Strunk & White give it as an example of
> good grammar or an example of moving prose?)
>
>   Hemingway is a bad role model. So is Mike Tyson but he can sure throw a
> punch.
>
>   .brad.18feb08.
>
> Craig Hancock <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>   Since Brad found Hemingway to be a poor role model, I decided to look
> at E.B. White, author (with Will Strunk) of “Elements of Style” and
> arguably one of the premier stylists in the language. The essay,
> chosen since I’m teaching it in a few weeks, is “Once More to the
> Lake,” which has been anthologized numerous times in best essay
> collections.
> I found twenty-three past perfect verb phrases in an essay of moderate
> length. I was actually surprised that I did not find more, but most of
> those that do show up are used to great effect.
> To those of you who don’t know the essay, it’s about going back with
> his son to a lake he had visited as a child with his father. He is
> struck by how little everything has changed, and he begins to feel like
> his son is himself and he is his father. I find it rich and moving,
> perhaps because I made annual visits to a lake in Maine with my family
> as a child. I taught it last year, though, and found most students,
> even my urban students, liked and admired it.
> I don't want to defend every use of the past perfect, but we should at
> least begin with an acknowledgement that it has a functional role
> within discourse.
> Here are some of the sentences, not a full list, but an attempt at a
> representative one.
>
> “I took along my son, who had never had any fresh water up his nose
> and who had seen lily pads only from train windows.”
>
> “The lake had never been what you would call a wild lake.”
>
> “But when I got back there, with my boy, and we settled into the kind
> of summertime I had known, I could tell that it was going to be pretty
> much the same as it had been before--…”
>
> “It was the arrival of this fly that convinced me beyond any doubt
> that everything was as it always had been, that the years were a
> mirage and that there had been no years.”
>
> “It seemed to me, as I kept remembering all this, that those times and
> those summers had been infinitely precious and worth saving. There had
> been jollity and peace and goodness. The arriving (at the beginning of
> August) had been so big a business in itself….”
>
> “Inside, all was just as it had always been, except there was more
> Coca-Cola and not so much Moxie and root beer and birch beer and
> sarsaparilla.”
>
> “It was like the revival of an old melodrama that I had seen long ago
> with childish awe.”
>
> “He pulled his dripping trunks from the line where they had hung all
> through the shower and wrung them out.”
>
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