Essential English
Page 3
Conscientiousness, keenness and ruthlessness, rightly directed
Judgment, based on well-informed common sense
A capacity for absorbing fact – and fancy – and expressing them in an acceptable manner
Adaptability – the power, whatever one’s personal predilections, of seeing things from the reader’s point of view
Knowledge of the main principles of the laws of libel, contempt and copyright
Physical fitness for a trying, sedentary life which takes its toll of nerves, sight and digestion
The team spirit – a newspaper is one of the most striking products of co-operative enterprise and effort
Text editors should generally come to editing after reporting. Text editors who do not appreciate from their own experience the reporters’ aims and difficulties and temptations to err, are invariably the worse for it. A year’s reporting, if varied, can be enough.
The ideal way to learn the craft is to sit with senior text editors and see the way they work, and at the same time to tackle gradually more important stories. Too many text editors are flung in at the deep end. They learn to swim but their strokes are atrocious. Text editors should fairly soon discover their own strengths, whether they are happy in writing a straight headline and extricating the hard facts for a terse evening newspaper story when the deadline is near, or at the opposite extreme, in the slow and painstaking task of disentangling a tricky law case. Irredeemably slow text editors will avoid the big city evening papers (well, such papers will avoid them) where speed and accuracy are at a premium all day long. They may be more at home on the popular morning newspaper, where, especially on national newspapers in Britain, rewriting is habitual whenever time allows. In between are the copydesk on the provincial morning newspaper or the serious daily or Sunday or magazine.
Journalists who choose editing as their craft will have less obvious excitement than the reporter: not for them the thrill of detection or the fast plane to Beirut. Their satisfaction lies in the skills of the craft, in communicating. And there are some excitements which reporting cannot match. There are nights of big news, the late-night flash in the Gulf War crisis, when text editors feel they are standing at the very centre of events. There is nothing to touch the fascination of seeing the news develop second by second and projecting a piece of history. Whether journalists see themselves essentially as writers or production people they cannot afford to miss copydesk training if they aspire to executive work. More and more executives in Britain and America are appointed from among those staff members who know the whole process of making a newspaper: how to convert the first idea into a well-founded column of type with display in the page, from the organisation of the research to the editing and projection in print.
No change in the organisation of a newspaper will affect this. Over the years we have seen the development of horizontal team journalism, in which a group of writers pool their investigative and writing talents. But it is a complete misunderstanding of the process to imagine that this system, or any other, does away with the need for copydesk editing skills (still less the need for writing ability). The team editor will normally do this work or another member of the team may have an aptitude for it. But somebody must do it or the journalism and production both suffer. Indeed, one of the difficulties of team journalism, among its attractions, is that the team editor’s tasks are so varied that he or she may fail to develop the specialist skills to the highest pitch. This is particularly true of condensation and production work, and when team editors virtually end up editing their own copy. This is never a good practice and is often downright dangerous. Everybody’s copy, including the editor’s, benefits from a second reading by a fresh critical mind.
CHAPTER TWO
Good English
People think I can teach them style. What stuff it is. Have something to say and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
English is a battlefield. Purists fight off invading yes-men, dropouts, hobos, killjoys, stooges, highbrows and co-eds. Vulgarians beseech them to trust the people because the people speak real good. Grammarians, shocked by sentences concluding with prepositions, construct syntactical defences up with which we will not put. Officials observe that in connection with recent disturbances there does not appear to have been a resolution of the issue. And journalists race to the colourful scene to report the dramatic new moves.
Everybody recognises that last bit as journalese. The Shorter Oxford Dictionary defined it as penny-a-liner’s English, the inflation of sentences for the sake of linage profit. But journalists do not deserve a monopoly of odium because they contributed a word for bad English to the language. The penny-a-liner, who has largely disappeared anyway, is a petty corrupter of the language by comparison with Her Majesty’s Government and the Pentagon. English has no greater enemy than officialese. Daily the stream of language is polluted by viscous verbiage. Meaning is clouded by vague abstraction, euphemism conceals identity, and words, words, words weigh the mind down.
The Americans are at it on a grander scale. Look what happened to ‘poor’ people. They became ‘needy’, then ‘deprived’, then ‘underprivileged’ or ‘disadvantaged’ and latterly they have been members of a ‘lower income group’, or, to be politically correct, ‘economically challenged’. As the cartoonist and writer Jules Feiffer observed, they still don’t have a dime but they have acquired a fine vocabulary.
Journalists are daily arbiters in all this. No professor of linguistics has as much influence on the language as the text editor who edits the day’s news. Words are our trade. It is not enough to get the news. We must be able to put it across. Meaning must be unmistakable, and it must also be succinct. Readers have not the time and newspapers have not the space for elaborate reiteration. This imposes decisive requirements. In protecting the reader from incomprehension and boredom, the text editor has to insist on language which is specific, emphatic and concise. Every word must be understood by the ordinary reader, every sentence must be clear at one glance, and every story must say something about people. There must never be a doubt about its relevance to our daily life. There must be no abstractions.
This places newspaper English firmly in the prose camp of Dryden, Bunyan, Butler, Shaw, Somerset Maugham, Orwell, Thurber. The style to reject is the mandarin style which is characterised by long sentences with many dependent clauses, by the use of the subjunctive and conditional, by exclamations and interjections, quotations, allusions, metaphors, long images, Latin terminology, subtlety and conceits. ‘Its cardinal assumption is that neither the writer nor the reader is in a hurry, that both are in possession of a classical education and a private income,’ wrote Cyril Connolly.
Reporters in their gloomier moments will affirm that all text editors, whether British sub-editors or American copy-readers, are butchers. The text editor does indeed have to make many a grave decision to amputate. The details on which the writer has spent hours have abruptly to be cut off because there is no room for them. But the real skill of text-editing does not lie in such drastic treatment. Anybody can lop off a story half-way. Text-editing is interesting only because it offers so much more scope than such simple hack work. Good text editors are surgeons who can save facts and who can make the body of the story more vigorous and healthy. Their instruments are a clear mind and a love of the language. When it is necessary to cut for length they struggle to save details by using the language more economically than the writer. They are specialists in concise writing. When length is not a problem they edit the text for meaning, clarity and accuracy. Grammar, punctuation and spelling they will correct in their stride. The assurance of instant comprehension for the reader is what will take their time.
All types of newspaper, local, regional and national, have to cope with copy which obscures the news, which delays the readers getting the human facts the headline has invited them to obtain. There are many reasons for this. Some copy from contacts and non-sta
ff sources is, to be polite, only semi-professional. There are widely varying standards even among trained staff reporters. Some of the best at ferreting out facts are not pithy writers and never will be. Reporters who can write well are occasionally lured into literary embroidery. Fairly often the reporter, wanted for another assignment, is more hard-pressed for time than the text editor.
The text editor must worry about words, sentences, and the structure of stories. Much of the time is spent on the headline and the first few sentences which lure the reader; often these determine the way the story should be developed. With the constant effort to render events concrete, vivid and human, text editors will develop an allergy to sloppy English. Their fingers will twitch even as their eyes skim the text. There is not much time for reflection. The diagnosis must be immediate and the cure instantaneous.
It is with this environment in mind that the following pages suggest ways in which text editors can improve their reactions. The intention is to analyse the fine skills of using words and sentences, and building these into various kinds of news story; and they attempt to put some of the preaching into practice. Even so they are no more than a compass in the jungle. They offer certain principles or conditions for clear expression, aware that there is no rule for original expression, that the principles may overlap or, infrequently, conflict, and that any chapter on the English word and sentence must necessarily be incomplete. It is not a grammar. Some knowledge of the pitfalls of dangling participles, pronouns and their antecedents, verbs and their subjects, and the sequence of tenses, must be assumed. As William Brewster1 pointed out long ago, the mere avoidance of grammatical barbarisms will not result in clear writing: ‘One might escape illiteracy but not necessarily confusion . . . To know what a sentence is saying is important, more important than anything else about it. That is rarely interfered with, directly, by the presence of barbarisms, and not grievously, for the most, by improprieties and solecisms, as they actually occur in writing; these things cause sorrow chiefly to the erudite or to the parvenu of style, whom they offend rather than confuse; the populace cares very little about them.’
Sentences – Limit the Ideas
A sentence is more likely to be clear if it is a short sentence communicating one thought, or a closely connected range of ideas.
There are roughly four kinds of sentence. The simple sentence has one subject and one predicate or statement (Eight bandits robbed a train yesterday). The compound sentence has two simple sentences joined by a conjunction (Eight bandits robbed a train yesterday and stole £80,000). The complex sentence has one principal statement and one or more subordinate statements or clauses which modify the main statement (Eight train bandits, who were foiled by a railway worker, were still being sought last night). Then there is the compound-complex sentence where all the statements have one or more modifying statements (Eight bandits with coshes who tried to rob a train yesterday were foiled by a worker who threw stones at them and forced them to drop £80,000).
All those sentences are clear. To attempt to say that newspapers should use only simple sentences is an absurdity. Economy as well as rhythm requires all kinds of sentence to be used. Often it is wasteful to introduce a complete subject and predicate for each idea. The subordinate clause in a complex sentence can state relations more precisely and more economically than can a string of simple sentences or compound sentences joined by and, but, so, etc.
And over the years we have learned to cut down loose subsidiary clauses into economical phrases. The real seduction of the simple sentence is that taken by itself it is short and it is confined to carrying one idea. The real trouble with so many compound-complex sentences is that they have to carry too many ideas.
In the example below (left), one sentence is trying to do the work of three. The first thought ends at ‘future’, and that is where the sentence should end. The text editor should cross out ‘and’, and pick up two new sentences, as on the right:
The French Government is expected to begin bilateral talks to replace the integrated military structures in the immediate future and will be willing to exchange, say, some infrastructure facilities enjoyed by the US and the United Kingdom for continued sharing in the long range early warning system, for France’s force de frappe could be destroyed by a sudden missile attack on her airfields.
The French Government is expected to begin bilateral talks to replace the integrated military structures in the immediate future. The French will be willing to exchange, say, some military installations used by the US and the United Kingdom for continued French sharing in the long range early warning system. This is because France’s atomic strike force could be destroyed by a missile attack on her airfields.
The second version is immediately clearer. The length of the sentences with too many ideas is not the cause of the disease; but it is often a clear symptom. It is the reason why some writers advise a limit on sentence length. Rudolf Flesch2 urges an average of 18 words to a sentence. The Elizabethan sentence, he says, ran to 45 words and the Victorian to 29, while ours runs to 20 and less. Web and fax have accentuated this trend to telegraphic communication.
The lesson is that where the ideas in the sentence are complex, they cannot intelligibly be presented in subsidiary clauses separated by a mere comma. The full stop is a great help to sanity. In swift editing – not rewriting – this 55-word sentence can be made comprehensible by being split into two (right):
On east–west relations Dr Kie-singer described the remarkably non-compromising attitude of the East Germans in the reply sent in September after a delay of three months by Herr Stoph, the East German Prime Minister, who attacked the Federal Government’s claims to speak for all Germans and proposed a draft treaty between ‘the two German states’.
On east–west relations Dr Kie-singer described the remarkably non-compromising attitude of the East Germans in the reply sent in September after a delay of three months. Herr Stoph, the East German Prime Minister, had attacked the Federal Government’s claims to speak for all Germans and proposed a draft treaty between ‘the two German states’.
A long confusing sentence is often produced by creating a subsidiary clause to carry one or more ideas in advance of the main idea. This defect and others in sentence structure will be examined in more detail in the chapter on introductions, but here is a typical example from a newspaper in the North of England. Look at the difficulties on the way:
Saying that while he accepted medical evidence that asbestosis was associated with the cause of death of a Washington chemical worker, John George Watson, aged 40, of 51 Pattinson Town, the Coroner, Mr A. Henderson, indicated at the inquest at Chester-le-Street last night that the final decision whether the disease caused or contributed to death would rest with the Pneumoconiosis Medical Panel.
Who is ‘he’?
Is this the name of the chemical worker, or the ‘he’ in the first line? We have to read on to learn that Mr Watson is not the Coroner.
What disease? We have to refer back 41 words to the mention of asbestosis.
The opening subsidiary clause here is 21 words long. It does not mean anything to the readers until they have read through to the end of the main clause. While readers are reading the main clause, they have to refer back in their mind to the qualifying subsidiary clause. It is hard in one reading to absorb the meaning of the whole sentence.
The sentence is simply overloaded. The burden of the thought should be redistributed:
The death of a Washington chemical worker, John George Watson, aged 40, of 51 Pattinson Town, was associated with asbestosis, said the Coroner, Mr A. Henderson, at Chester-le-Street last night. But the final decision whether asbestosis caused or contributed to death would rest with the Pneumoconiosis Medical Panel.
Opening a sentence with a subsidiary clause has special difficulties for the reader when the two ideas do not march in the same direction. News values apart, the text editor should take the sentence carrying the most important thought and give it an imme
diate identity of its own. Another sentence should deal with the other thought:
At the end of a rousing speech on Labour Government policies which she said were designed to remould the economic life of the country irrespective of the many difficulties involved and the grumbles of those who disliked change, the Minister of Transport, speaking at Aberystwyth yesterday, expressed her bitter disappointment that the Stratford strike had not been settled.
The Minister of Transport yesterday expressed her ‘bitter disappointment’ that the Stratford rail strike had not been solved.
She said this at the end of a rousing speech at Aberystwyth defending Labour Government economic policies ...
Sheer wordiness was a fault in this story – but, even if the sentence had been shorter, confusion would have been created by the way the sentence structure linked separate thoughts. As Marc Rose, a Reader’s Digest editor, once complained to the New York Times: ‘Born in Waukegan, Ill., I get damn sick of the non-sequiturs’.3
Obituary notices are full of non-sequiturs, and it is no use attempting to rewrite them as single sentences, compound or complex:
A keen golfer, he leaves three children.
Leaving three children, he was a keen golfer.
He was a keen golfer and leaves three children.
He leaves three children and was a keen golfer.
He was born in Alabama and always arrived punctually at work.
The last example gives the impression that the circumstances of his birth contrived to make him punctual. But there is no such cause and effect. The reader has been led up the garden path. The needlessly linked sentences divert the mind to speculation. There should be two sentences, but even these can be awkward; adjoining sentences need some linking thought, as in the second rewritten example below: