Essential English
Page 14
Now, the news here comes down to a single word: BEHEADED. The intro has simply to say that two soldiers presumed killed in fighting were beheaded. But look at how one morning paper handled the story:
The heads of two British soldiers killed last Thursday were exhibited on sticks in Taiz, twin capital of the Yemen, according to ‘reliable information’ given to a Press conference in Aden yesterday by Major-General John Cubbon, GOC Middle-East Land Forces.
The text editor allowed the second event – the exhibition of the heads – to overtake the real news which, at this stage, was the actual beheading. Until readers have realised that there has been a beheading they are not ready for the information about heads on sticks in Taiz. Another intro was:
A British officer and a soldier, killed in an ambush by the ‘Red Wolves’ of the Yemen, were beheaded by the Arabs.
Then their heads were put on show sticks at Taiz, twin capital of the Yemen, it was revealed yesterday.
The criticism of this intro is that it takes too long to reach the key act and key word, the beheading. This next version was cluttered:
Two British soldiers, killed in bitter fighting, were beheaded by screaming tribesmen who carried the heads as trophies across the frontier to Yemen.
Then, according to reports reaching here today, the heads were stuck on spikes and exhibited in the main square of Taiz, twin capital of the Yemen.
This one benefited by its directness:
Two British soldiers have been killed and decapitated by the Yemeni.
One paper did not use the key word, as we see it, but it squeezed in two strong news points intelligibly:
Two British soldiers killed in fighting with tribesmen had their heads cut off and exhibited on sticks in Taiz, the Yemen capital.
Special Intro Problems
Intros beginning with quotes and intros based on reported speech need critical attention. They are apt to produce problems of identification and meaning and to be replete with officialese.
Quotes
Some offices ban quote intros because of typographical complications. There is more against them than that. Readers have to do too much work. They have to find out who is speaking and they may prefer to move on. Only for the most startling quote will the average reader feel like making the effort. Few baits of quotation are good enough in this over-fished pond. Often, as here, they merely delay the real news point (left), which is given in the version on the right:
‘I have had no row with Mrs Castle but I am very sad at leaving’, said London’s Mr Traffic, Sir Alexander Samuels, last night after resigning as honorary chief adviser to Mrs Barbara Castle, the Minister of Transport.
London’s Mr Traffic, Sir Alexander Samuels, has resigned as honorary chief adviser on road traffic to Mrs Barbara Castle, the Minister of Transport. He said last night: ‘I have had no row with Mrs Castle but I am very sad at leaving.’
Quotes are almost always better in support of an opening statement. The right choice was made here:
Mr. Ian Smith, the Rhodesian Prime Minister, today accused the United Nations of incredible deceit and hypocrisy over its efforts to smash Rhodesia’s self-proclaimed independence.
‘I venture to predict’, he said in a New Year television address, ‘that there is more justice where the demon Satan reigns than where the United Nations wallows in its sanctimonious hypocrisy.’
The next example shows how an intro grounded on the third person can be more pithy and lively.
Vice-President Humphrey, speaking today on the 21st anniversary of Sir Winston Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech at Fulton, Missouri, predicted that the Iron Curtain could be replaced by the ‘Open Door’.
This is comprehensible, attractive and accurate. The third-person intro enables the text editor to contrast the Iron Curtain and the Open Door as the Vice-President did, even though Mr Humphrey did not do so in the style of a newspaper intro. To have begun with a quotation would have involved this:
‘It is my belief that we stand today upon the threshold of a new era in our relations with the peoples of Europe, a period of new engagement’, said Vice-President Humphrey yesterday.
‘Exactly 21 years ago today Winston Churchill spoke the well-remembered words “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent” … The Curtain has become increasingly permeable in some places … I do not believe that a realistic settlement of European problems can be achieved without the participation of the United States and Russia. The goals of Western European unity and of Atlantic partnership are not in opposition to the goal of the Open Door. They are the key to that door.’
Three paragraphs are now needed to convey the point of Vice-President Humphrey’s address. Quotes in stories like this are best used to substantiate the intro, not to replace it.
Should quote intros be banned altogether? It would be a mistake. There are times where the third-person intro is duller or where the problems of identification are not acute:
The last words the legendary Cuban guerrilla leader, Che Guevara, spoke just before he died were to identify himself and admit that he had failed.
That meets the usual criteria for an intro, but here is a livelier version, using a direct quote:
‘I am Che Guevara, I have failed’, were the last words of the legendary Cuban guerrilla leader, spoken to Bolivian soldiers just before he died of his wounds early yesterday.
And again:
The Governor-General of Canada, General Georges Vanier, made a plea for unity yesterday.
It is safe but it is not as good as the direct quote:
‘I pray God that we all go forward hand in hand. We cannot run the risk of this great country falling into pieces.’ These words were part of a plea for unity …
Tenses
Sol Chandler once observed of Australian newspapers, addicted to the past tense and conditional, that it would not surprise him to see any paper’s splash on a great event start with: ‘Australia had declared war on China, the Prime Minister told the Federal Parliament in Canberra yesterday’.
The past tense (left) is slower and can be confusing (does this passage mean the President once believed in a volunteer force but has now changed his mind? No, it does not). The dramatic present (right) should be used for intros and main text:
An all-volunteer armed force was the ideal, said the President in a message to Congress.
An all-volunteer armed force is the ideal, said the President in a message to Congress.
Verbosity
Text editors should always be on the alert when they see intros written by rail officials, clerks of works or court officers. They are not adept at the job.
A British Rail official said yesterday that the main-line cancellations were an economy move because a sufficient number of passengers were not now using the through train.
This meant that too few people are using the through train.
Reported statements from officials, if merely rendered direct into third person, are a common source of muddled intros (and muddled copy). I did say something about third-person reporting earlier (pp. 64 – 71), but the point for now is that the intro does not have to put into indirect speech every single word the man uttered. The freedom third-person reporting gives is to put the news into simpler words – always provided they convey the sense accurately. It is absurd, in these instances, to seek refuge in direct quotes:
Penn Yan – ‘The adverse publicity against the village of Penn Yan during the past several weeks in regard to the gross pollution of Seneca Lake was based on misleading information issued by uninformed sources’, Municipal Plant Superintendent Leland A. Welker said yesterday …
Penn Yan – Tests showed Penn Yan village is not to blame for the gross pollution of Seneca Lake, said Municipal Plant Superintendent Leland A. Welker yesterday. Mr Welker said the adverse publicity was ‘based on misleading information by uninformed sources’ …
That intro (left) was written b
y Municipal Sewage Plant Superintendent Leland A. Welker. Municipal sewage plant superintendents need supervision on intro-writing. The reporter or text editor has to do the work, and they will not – I hope – allow ‘in regard to’. It should have been rewritten as on the right.
Portmanteau intros
I have urged text editors to concentrate in every intro on the single essential news point. There are a few occasions when they have to fall back on a portmanteau intro:
The President made a major statement yesterday on problems in the Far East, Germany and the Near East.
Most portmanteau intros are as dull as this. But every one, even the occasional lively portmanteau intro, carries a real trap for unwary editors:
Bribery, violence, anarchy and ignorance are dramatically exposed in a report to be published tomorrow by the Institute of Race Relations.
It would be hard to contrive a more arresting portmanteau intro. Tell me more, says the reader. But in the long story which followed there was no single word of violence. Text editors should always check that the story delivers the goods promised in the intro; with portmanteau intros they should check every promise.
Questions
No news intro should start with a question, whether in quotes or reported speech, and still less in any other form. Intros are for telling the reader, not for interrogation.
Abbreviations
It is unrealistic not to recognise that certain abbreviations have passed so much into the language that may be safely used in the intro: TV and UN and NATO internationally; BBC in Britain; and GOP and CBS in the United States. These are a few examples. There are others. Even so, it is good working practice to avoid abbreviations in intros. Just as in text, they should be spelled out when used first time; and text editors should never assume that the initials which are familiar to them will be familiar to the reader. Excessive use of abbreviations is in any event unsightly.
Delayed intros
The discussion has so far concentrated on the straightforward news story where the technique is to bring in at once the human results of the activity. There are times when the point of the intro can be delayed with effect. This is when delaying the news point momentarily can add punch or suspense or emphasise a contrast.
There are any number of gradations of delay in a story. I am referring here only to intros. Some stories are deliberately written so that the punch comes in the last line. Court stories in the popular papers especially are written so that the routine hard news point is concealed in a vignette. This is a technique affecting the whole construction of the story and we will examine it later. For the moment we remain concerned with the general news intro.
The delayed intro in general news can be as short as waiting to the end of the first sentence. Instead of saying ‘Peter Bloggs was recaptured yesterday’, it could be:
Borstal escapee Peter Bloggs went for a swim yesterday – and came face to face with an off-duty policeman in swimming trunks.
The delayed intro is a device for all types of newspaper, including the serious:
The application form described Oliver Greenhalgh as a rodent operative. Questions on qualifications and experience were ignored. After a payment of £11 a certificate was issued stating that Mr. Greenhalgh had been accepted as a fellow of the English Association of Estate Agents and Valuers.
Oliver Greenhalgh is a cat.
The same paper also used a delayed intro to effect in reporting on General de Gaulle’s tour of Poland. It would have been possible to report the news in the traditional first sentence – that General de Gaulle was rebuffed by the First Secretary of the Polish Communist Party. But the paper gave the intro an element of suspense with the final words coming like the pounding of a fist on the table:
General de Gaulle now has the answer for which he has been waiting since he arrived in Warsaw. It came today, from Mr. Gomulka, the First Secretary of the Polish Communist Party and the ‘strong man’ of Poland, after his address to the solemn session of the Polish Parliament, the Sejm. The answer was hard, uncompromising, and just barely courteous.
Text editors should consider using a delayed intro occasionally on a suitable hard news story when the normal construction would read like the intro in every other paper. There was a good opportunity to exploit contrast when Britain’s submarine, the Repulse, was launched and ended up on a mudbank. Instead of simply saying ‘Britain’s submarine went on a mudbank at the launching yesterday’, the text editor might have contrived a delayed intro:
Shipyard workers cheered. A bottle of home-made elderberry wine, released by Lady Joan Zucherman, broke over the bows. HMS Repulse slid proudly, perfectly down the slipway at Barrow. And two minutes later £55 million-worth of Polaris submarine was aground on a mudbank.
To sum up this chapter on intros here is a horrific talisman of 79 words, subsidiary clauses and all:
In his address to the annual meeting of North Riding Dental Practitioners, held at the Golden Fleece Hotel, Thirsk, the chairman, Mr. C.W.L. Heaton, expressed his concern that there were still many practitioners in the area who did not appreciate the importance of their attendance at meetings as complacency of this nature did not give much encouragement to those who were striving to secure a betterment factor in forthcoming negotiations between the Minister of Health and the dental profession.
CHAPTER SIX
The Structure of a News Story – The News Lead
The structure of a news story depends both on length and content. The story told in three or four paragraphs is simply an intro followed by further details. As the length increases, however, those further details multiply and their introduction and treatment must be handled carefully. Much will depend on the nature of the story, whether it is basically one of action or one of statement and opinion. Chronology is a guide to the construction of the action story: it is no guide to the construction of the complex statement – opinion story.
Action Stories
Let us return to the story of the Berlin Wall rescue (pp. 97 – 8). The original intro was:
After hearing shooting at the Berlin Wall yesterday an American military policeman raced to the scene and found East German guards trying to drag a refugee back. The American soldier went to a second-storey window overlooking the Wall, threw a tear-gas grenade, to make the East Germans release the refugee, then climbed on top of the Wall and amid a hail of bullets between East and West helped to pull the refugee to the West.
We rewrote that intro:
An American military policeman braved a hail of bullets to pull a wounded refugee over the Berlin Wall yesterday.
The intro now distils the essence of the news. It is a simple direct sentence not overloaded with detail. But it has not indicated all the most important news points in a long and detailed story. This now has to be done in other sentences and paragraphs which together make a news lead. Each succeeding sentence should be as simple and direct as the intro. It should give a news point and, if possible, add detail the generalised intro has omitted.
The refugee was hit five times – but he will live. The soldier, 22-year-old Hans Puhl, threw a tear-gas grenade to make East German guards release the refugee. Then amid fire from the East and counter-fire from the West, he climbed on the Wall to drop a rope to the wounded man, Michel Meyer, aged 21.
The most dramatic items of the news story have now been presented in a succinct news lead. Some of the identifying details (such as names) excluded from the intro have been added – but without delaying the development of the key points. The news lead has concentrated on results. It has omitted both other detail and explanation. The story now has to explain how the refugee, Meyer, got into his predicament; how the soldier, Puhl, climbed on the high wall, how he came to be on the scene at all, how the firing started. How should we do all this? In action stories, as I have said, chronology is the master. Once the most dramatic items have been presented – and only then – we go back to the beginnings and build a sequential narrative. In doing this, we check
that every point in the news lead is substantiated – for instance that there was a ‘hail’ of bullets and not merely a couple of shots. The logical narrative is simple enough. The skill is in the way we amplify what we have already told the reader and knit together the two sides of the story.
The paragraph after the news lead should read something like this:
Meyer had swum the River Spree to reach the Wall at dawn. East Border guards opened fire and he was hit five times in the arm and legs. Hans Puhl, born in Bremerhaven but taken to the US when he was 14, was on duty at the Checkpoint Charlie crossing point when he heard the shooting about 100 yards away.