Essential English
Page 13
The Council of the Law Society in a memorandum on motoring offences to the Lord Chancellor, the Home Secretary and the Minister of Transport today recommends the setting up of traffic courts and special corps to relieve the police of non-criminal traffic commitments.
The Law Society wants traffic courts and special corps to relieve the police of non-criminal traffic duties. In a memorandum today to …
It would be wrong to delay a source beyond the intro, or to lead with an unidentified pronoun:
Traffic courts and special corps to relieve the police of non-criminal traffic commitments are ‘urgently required’ says a memorandum on motoring offences today.
They deplore the waste of the police’s time on non-criminal traffic offences, says the Law Society today, in calling for traffic courts and a special traffic corps.
No pronoun should ever be used for an intro before the noun is introduced:
He was opposed to capital punishment which he depicted as ‘a barbarism that has judicially murdered innocent men’, said the leader of the Progressive party, Mr. Snudge.
The leader of the Progressive party, Mr. Snudge, condemned capital punishment yesterday as ‘a barbarism that has judicially murdered innocent men’.
Where the source of the statement determines the news value it is best to begin by naming the source at once.
Now, finally, for the third category – the relevance of the newspaper’s audience to the amount of source detail in an intro:
A father was electrocuted yesterday as he tried to fix the fairy lights on his children’s Christmas tree.
That is the essence of the news. It is fine as a general news intro retailing a fact for the general reader of a national newspaper, or London evening. But imagine the accident happened in a town of 80,000 and the story is being edited for the evening paper. Then the intro could profitably say: ‘A Luton father was electrocuted yesterday …’
Take it a stage further. The accident happened in a small market town and is being edited for the town’s weekly newspaper. It now becomes a story for a specialised audience. It would now be right to let the intro say: ‘Mr … of … was electrocuted on …’
Text editors must ask themselves this: How many readers will be induced to read the story primarily by the inclusion in the intro of the name of the man, or place? Is it significant to the readers of this newspaper? On local or provincial papers text editors should err on the side of including the name in the intro. When the area referred to is cheek by jowl with the publishing centre of the paper it looks needlessly vague to write:
The future of a town’s ambitious swimming pool scheme hangs in the balance after a shock victory last night by opponents of the plan.
Readers of that in a Bristol area paper could have been told without fear straight away that it was nearby Keynsham’s scheme. The following intro would have been all right in a national newspaper:
A managing director under fire from housewives who claim his factory chimney wrecks their washing has asked a local councillor to help track down complaints.
But that intro appeared in a Darlington paper and about a Darlington factory. The second paragraph went on:
Mr D. J. Grant, head of Darlington Chemical and Insulating Co., has asked Coun. Clifford Hutchinson to join him in ending the washday menace of the Faverdale area of the town.
Last week residents complained that grit from the chemical works chimney is burning holes in their washing.
For the local paper this second paragraph, plus recognisable names and places, would have been better as the intro; indeed the first paragraph could be deleted altogether.
There is a further inducement for the regional newspaper to be more specific (but without falling back on subsidiary clauses). It is that disguising the identity of the place leads to the proliferation of vague intros hinged insecurely on the indefinite article:
A council chairman has resigned because of a row over prayers …
A doctor has accused a local authority of carelessness …
Overloading
Details of sequence and source have been identified as two impediments to the intro. The third is trying to make one sentence carry too many details or ideas. That is a fault in a sentence anywhere. In an intro it is fatal. Yet it is a common failing even among sophisticated reporters. Entranced by all they have discovered, reporters are tempted to thread all the most colourful beads on to the same thin thread of a sentence, and it just breaks.
Mr Joe Bloggs, the handsome grey-haired missing textile company founder, aged 48, who had a passion for fast sports cars, and was often seen with Princess Hilda, the wool heiress, before disappearing from the Dover Express on July 2, will be charged with misappropriating £325,068 in the High Court on September 1.
Hell, yes, but what size hat does he wear?
That fictional example of Reporters’ Baroque is 52 words, at least 20 too long for the basic news. If text editors work to a word limit they have to strike out the excess detail for insertion lower in the story. This is the real justification for limiting the number of words in an intro. As well as discouraging subsidiary clause openings, it forces the editor to squeeze the real news into the intro. A guillotine concentrates the mind wonderfully.
One simple sentence to an intro, one idea to a sentence. In the example below, the 44-word first intro on the left needs two breaths. The version on the right restricts itself to the single news idea – that a policeman’s sense to keep talking saved the lives of a family. Once that single idea has been conveyed in the intro, substantiation can follow:
A policeman kept up a running telephone conversation with a despondent mother of five who said she was going to turn on the gas in her home and end the lives of herself and her children last night, then quickly dispatched a police car.
Police Constable Peter Folino said the woman called twice and said she had turned on the gas on the second call. Then she hung up. Because of Folino’s quick action, police arrived in minutes and turned off the gas before the mother or children suffered any ill effects.
Police Constable Peter Folino kept talking last night – and saved the lives of a mother and five children.
The despondent woman phoned the police to say she was going to gas herself and her children.
Folino talked and quickly sent the police who turned off the gas before the family was hurt.
He said the woman had called twice. On the second call she said she had turned the gas on, then hung up.
She was being questioned today.
She was being questioned early today.
The second version saves three lines on a story originally totalling 17 lines: a worthwhile saving for the ten minutes that it should take to write off the more direct version. Only when the intro has established the news point – the happy ending – does the story go back to the beginning of the event and develop chronologically.
The news gets lost again here, and the intro should be split, as on the right, into two sentences:
A noisy meeting of 3,000 workers voted in Birmingham today to instruct their shop stewards to get the BMC management and the ETU together to settle within 24 hours the pay dispute which has halted all car production and thrown more than 21,000 workers idle in the Midlands.
A noisy meeting of 3,000 workers voted in Birmingham today for peace moves in the BMC pay dispute which has halted car production and thrown more than 21,000 idle in the Midlands.
They instructed their shop stewards to get the BMC management and the ETU to settle within 24 hours.
Most overloaded intros can be lightened in quick subbing. The facts deleted are then interpolated in the next paragraph or lower. This transposition of a phrase or two can make all the difference to the immediate intelligibility of an intro. The italicised section here does not need to be in the intro:
A former French parachutist who was serving a life sentence in the island fortress of St Martin de Re for complicity in the murder of a police officer in the Algiers ins
urrection of 1962, has escaped by means which recall the flight of Edmond Dantes from Chateau d’If in ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’.
He is believed to have left the prison, which is about a mile off La Rochelle, on the Atlantic Coast, in the trunk of another prisoner pardoned by President de Gaulle and released on Friday evening with two others.
The man, Clause Tenne, was reported present when the morning roll call was taken, though officials are not sure now whether it was he, in fact, who replied ‘present’.
The first intro is 55 words long. The literary reference is fine, but the reader loses some of the flavour by the way the editor has left in so much superfluous detail. The italic section should be transposed to the third paragraph or even lower as a separate background statement:
Tenne was imprisoned for complicity in the murder of a police officer in the Algiers insurrection of 1962.
Editors can, again, save this overloaded intro:
It is a sobering thought that, ten years after the Committee on Grass Utilisation, under Sir Sydney Carne, reported that improved methods in production and use of grass were not coming into wide use as rapidly as they should, speakers at a conference on grass conservation at Bristol last week should have used even stronger words to describe the existing situation.
That really needs rewriting, but quickly editing the intro as it stands the words in italic can be deleted altogether or easily transposed to a later sentence to leave:
It is a sobering thought that, ten years after the Committee on Grass Utilisation called for better methods of grass production and use, speakers at a conference at Bristol last week should have used even stronger words.
In the discussion so far I have stressed the need to shed the intro of extraneous detail, whether of sequence, source or subsidiary news point. But clearly the words that remain in an intro must pull their weight. It is easier to keep the intro short if it does not carry identifying detail; but some specific identifying detail is needed in all news intros. The test is whether the detail applies to a single news point, how far it identifies the news subject and how far it merely adds to the decoration. If the detail is an integral identifying part of a single news point, it is unlikely to be an example of sequence or source obsession or overloading. The intros on the left below show the perils of denuding. They are anaemic compared with the intros with detail on the right. The anaemic intro is a less common error, but it demonstrates the limits of word-shedding and economical generality.
An agricultural show cancelled some events yesterday because of the spread of cattle disease.
All livestock classes at the Royal Smithfield Show were cancelled yesterday because of the spread of foot-and-mouth disease.
An air crash in which British holidaymakers died last month may have been caused by poison gases leaking into the pilots’ cabin.
The pilot of the DC4 chartered airliner which plunged into a mountain near Perpignan last month, killing 83 British holiday-makers, was probably seriously affected by carbon monoxide poisoning.
Three Aids to Better Intros
We have now examined three main causes of bad intros: chronology, source obsession and overloading. Before we look at some specialist problems of the intro, here are two suggestions for finding a route through any labyrinth.
The telegram
Where does the avalanche of words touch real life? What effect is the news buried in it going to have on people’s lives and happiness? Decide that, then imagine telling the news by telegram. Well, since nobody sends telegrams much these days, imagine you are at a public pay phone with three minutes or less to get the point across. Obviously we do not want an intro in breathless telegraphese, but the mental trick often helps to elicit the real meaning of the story: editors of text for print and broadcasting will find they dispense with the incidentals, the venue and the background and the tempting details. It is just the same as imagining having to tell somebody urgently what the story is all about. It is gratifying how this simple trick helps to shed literary complications and reveal the hard nugget of news.
For instance, in the following story, exactly as received, the text editor would not dream of talking about ‘consequential increase’.
If British Railways decide to forgo an application to the Transport Tribunal for fares increase in the period for which London Transport have agreed not to make fares increases, any consequential increase in British Railways’ revenue deficit will rank for grant, Mr Tom Fraser, Minister of Transport, said in a written answer.
The text editor should think of the telegram being sent to a rather aged relative who wouldn’t know a subsidiary clause if it hit him.
BRITISH RAIL WILL PEG FARES.
Or expanded:
BRITISH RAILWAYS INVITED BY TRANSPORT MINISTER FRASER TO PEG FARES FOR SAME PERIOD AS LONDON TRANSPORT STOP GOVERNMENT WILL PAY ANY DEFICIT.
This telegram should then be filled out:
British Railways were invited to peg their fares yesterday by the Minister of Transport, Mr Fraser. He said that if they agreed to keep their fares down in the period already agreed by London Transport, the Government would meet any deficit.
If the text editor looks at the following intro on an accident story and applies the telegram technique, the clouds disappear. Nobody would tell a friend, ‘Minor head lacerations were suffered by Peter Muratore’.
Minor head lacerations were suffered by Peter Muratore, 36, of 287 Hartsdale Road, Irondequoit, about 2.45 a.m. yesterday when he fell asleep while driving north in River Boulevard, at the University of Rochester campus, and crashed into a parked car, police said. He was treated at Strong Memorial Hospital and released. The parked car was owned by Mrs Shirley Graham, Greenville, S.C.
PETER MURATORE, 36, 287 HARTSDALE ROAD, IRONDEQUOIT, FELL ASLEEP DRIVING NORTH IN RIVER BOULEVARD STOP CRASHED INTO PARKED CAR UNIVERSITY ROCHESTER CAMPUS 2.45 A.M. MINOR HEAD CUTS TREATED STRONG MEMORIAL HOSPITAL STOP PARKED CAR OWNED BY MRS SHIRLEY GRAHAM.
And we end up with this intro:
Peter Muratore, 36, of 287 Hartsdale Road, Irondequoit, fell asleep while driving north in River Boulevard and crashed into a parked car at the University of Rochester campus at 2.45 a.m. yesterday.
He was treated for minor head cuts at Strong Memorial Hospital. The parked car was owned by Mrs Shirley Graham, Greenville, S.C.
It is absurd, in any event, to start with such a low-key word as ‘minor’. Always look for the positive statement for the intro, and, subject to accuracy, save the qualifying and nullifying statements for a subsidiary position.
The important you
Intros should make the personal relevance of the story a lead point whenever possible. On the left is a New York report which focuses on garage union members. But the real point of impact of the story is on thousands of drivers who will have to park their own cars. Note that the rewrite is about half as long, because we have avoided repeating the same information.
City parking garage attendants last night authorized a strike that could lead to a walkout early next month – a potential disruption to the lives of tens of thousands of motorists.
With less than two weeks to go before their contract with private garage owners expires, union leaders said it’s increasingly likely their members will walk off the job on March 5.
Fred Alston, business manager for Teamsters Local 272, said many of his 5,000 members haven’t had a raise in eight years and that owners so far have offered them only an extra 5 cents an hour.
‘Since 1991 the guys haven’t gotten an increase, and they’re offering 5 cents?’ said Alston. ‘It’s a slap in the face.’
Tens of thousands of drivers will have to find and reclaim their own parked cars if attendants in 1,500 privately owned city garages walk out on March 5.
They authorized their union, Teamsters Local 272, to strike then if a new contract is not signed. Fred Alston, the Local’s business manager, said many of his 5,000 members had not had a raise in eight years and that owners had offer
ed only an extra five cents an hour. ‘It’s a slap in the face.’
Garages could try to bring in replacement crews. Joel Stahl, of the Metropolitan Parking Association, representing most of the owners, would only say negotiations are under way.
A strike by the union would cause headaches for drivers in Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan and the Bronx. It would force motorists who rent spaces in nearly 1,500 privately owned garages to fetch their own cars or rely on replacement crews, Alston said.
Joel Stahl, of the Metropolitan Parking Association, which represents most of city garage owners, said he couldn’t address Alston’s charges because negotiations are under way.
The key word
In trying that technique of putting the copy aside and composing a mental telegram or swift e-mail, the text editor will often find that a single word or phrase is the vital signal. With the accident to Mr Muratore it was ‘fell asleep’. This key word concept is one of the secrets of successful headlines. It can also help with intros. Here is an example. The Middle East Command in Aden announced one Saturday that two named soldiers were missing presumed dead after a clash with rebel Yemen tribesmen. The next day the Army commander called a press conference and announced that the men who had died in the fighting were later beheaded and their heads were exhibited on sticks in the Yemeni capital of Taiz.