Essential English
Page 23
The features editor should study the structure of the best feature stories in the newspapers and news magazines. Features text editors are not there to write features: that is the job of the writers. But the features text editor should be able to tell a writer what is wrong with the structure of a story; and should be able to make suggestions for improvement. I say ‘suggestions’ because there should be time in features editing to discuss improvements with the writer. Features text editors can make real improvements in both the language and the structure of pieces presented even by brilliant writers; occasionally the specialist overlooks the ignorance of the average reader; new features writers are often on an adjectival spree or simply out to show their skill.
Features editors should always put their observations to even the best writers – but where there is a margin of doubt they should give the writer the preference and they should not hack good writing to preconceived notions. If you have gone to features editing from straight news editing, beware the reflex actions you have rightly cultivated as a straight news journalist. In features, the mood, the style may be everything. This is also true of the news-features which can appear on a news page, the occasions when a descriptive commentator is covering a news scene and there is no hard news at that precise moment. For instance, here is a news-feature intro from Aden by David Holden:
‘Gone away’ says the sign painted on the wall of Aden’s biggest prison by some waggish British soldier a couple of months ago when the last of South Arabia’s political detainees were released. ‘Gone away – no milk, no papers.’
The sign is still there; and in two or three weeks from now when the last British troops leave Aden for good, it may well serve as a mocking epitaph for 128 years of empire in South Arabia.
In Aden, the empire was never very imperial and, apart from ‘Ali Baba’s’ mobile chip shop, it is not leaving much behind. Already this is a half-abandoned city.
A sub with itching fingers might have been tempted to rewrite a hard news intro: ‘Already Aden is a half-abandoned city’. That would, of course, have ruined an evocative intro which had woven into it some of the background and a news point which was much more tellingly made in the context. Gone away, gone away … the desolation is vivid.
As a final caution, read this intro. The hard news was simply that Irish people were being asked to stay in England for Christmas because of the risk of spreading foot-and-mouth disease. Peter Dunn had visited some of the Irish stranded for Christmas, and he might easily have begun: ‘Christmas dinner has been specially laid on for some 250 Irish stranded in London by the foot-and-mouth restrictions.’ Instead he chose a detail – a specific human Irish detail which makes us want to delve deeper:
Mr. Allen C. Breeze, Irish poet, author of Tshombe’s Lament and owner of T.S. Eliot’s false teeth, will not be going home to Ireland this Christmas, though he had planned to. He has given his air ticket to his friend, Charlie, a tall serious man who is in commerce.
Intros like this still the itchiest subbing fingers.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Headlines
What the News Headline Says
If I choose to head an article ‘An Inquiry into the Conditions of Mycenaean Civilisation in the Heroic Epoch, with Special Reference to the Economic and Domestic Functions of Women Before and After the Conjectural Date of the Argive Expedition against Troy’, – if, I say, I choose for my article some snappy little title like that, I really have no right to complain if (when I send it to the Chicago Daily Scoop), they alter it to ‘How Helen Did the Housekeeping’.
G. K. CHESTERTON
They might nowadays have changed Chesterton’s manuscript to the even pithier ‘How Helen Kept House’. But Chesterton would clearly have made a brilliant features sub-editor. The difficulty in writing headlines is precisely in conveying in a few attractive words the essence of a complicated set of facts. I would say that writing good headlines is 50 per cent of text editors’ skills. They have to catch readers on the wing. In half a dozen words they have to inform them tersely and accurately of a shattering or confused event, or arouse their curiosity in a subtle manifestation of human behaviour. This skill can be developed because there are certain principles for good headline writing; a text editor of genuine flair may occasionally break all the rules, but no more than the composer who deliberately introduces discord into harmonies. Every bit of available time spent chiselling out the right words in the right sequence is time well spent.
The headline gives emphasis to a few words in bold type and every word must be weighed. There is a double responsibility on headline writers. They have to attract as many readers as they can into the text of the story, or condemn it to unread obscurity; but even where they fail they have an effect, for many who do not read the story none the less retain an impression from scanning the headline.
Accuracy, intelligibility and vigour are the requirements, and any newspaper which is careless with its headline writing is careless with its own purpose and vitality. Where headlines are wordy, vague or confused, the newspaper seems to be in its dotage. Where every headline goes unerringly to the point with precision or wit, the whole newspaper comes alive. The art of the headline lies in imagination and vocabulary; the craft lies in accuracy of content, attractiveness of appearance, and practicality.
The Headline’s Purpose
A prize young bullock escaped one day from the cattle market in Darlington. The bullock was chased by nine men along several shopping streets in town until it was recaptured. The bullock did no damage but provided a lot of temporary excitement. The reporter duly described all this with quotes included, and the copy came to the text editor for a headline. On it, after deliberation, the text editor inscribed the following headline, which passed into print:
NO DAMAGE AND
NO ONE HURT
The reporter the next day complained that his story had not been used. Clearly if he had been extraordinarily assiduous he would have found it, but only the more dedicated readers of the text that day would have been drawn to the story of the bullock.
The headline was not merely negative. It could have been written about the bulk of the proceedings in Darlington that day. It was undistinctive to the point of extinction: but it will survive in the pages as one of the finest examples of a headline that wasn’t. The headline must tell the news; the text editor who writes it must have a sense of what news is, just as much as the reporter. What is it that has happened to arrest attention? What is new and interesting? What is different? The result of the activity is none of these things. ‘No damage and no one hurt’ could be news if it happened after an explosion or if it recorded, say, a day without traffic accidents. But here the result of the activity is not surprising; it is the cause of the activity which is different.
A bullock in its normal way will be expected to do no damage and hurt nobody. But a bullock does not run through the shopping streets every day. The headline writer, then, must at least begin by using the word bullock. Should the headline then be ‘Bullock does no damage’? That headline is certainly accurate. But has it told the reader what the news really is? Is it the bullock’s failure to decimate the population which is surprising – or is it simply the diversion of the bullock’s chase through the streets?
The trouble with ‘Bullock does no damage’ is not that there is anything in it which is wrong but that there is not enough in it which is right. It is not related enough to the events of the day. It does not tell the news. The headline will have to be built on the simple news fact of a bullock running loose through shopping streets. We could write ‘Men chase loose bullock’. But again that is too unspecific, too unrelated to the story. It would be much better to write ‘Nine men chase bullock’; or, if there is room ‘Nine chase bullock in town’. Better still, we could change the tone of the headline to emphasise that the news lies in the antics of the bullock rather than in any heavy drama: ‘Prize bullock goes shopping’.
I have explored the case of the galloping
bullock because I want to stress that the headline must sum up the news in the story it serves – and no other. It must distil the news. It must be specific. The first task, then, in writing a good headline is to read the copy carefully and decide on the basic news point. This may not be in the first paragraph. With most news stories it should be there, and if it is not, you may have to reorganise the story to bring the news to the top. But sometimes the news point is legitimately delayed and often the news is a complex of various facts in the story, so that enjoining the text editor to write a headline based on the first paragraph is not enough.
The headline writer must think hard on what single element in the story it is which makes it new, different, and worth its space in the paper. To make this judgment text editors need to know the background to the news item they are editing: if it is a developing story they must be fully aware of the previous developments and how other newspapers assessed the news point at their publication time. Unimportant details and subsidiary information are put aside, to focus on the real significance of the story. As they read the copy, text editors sum up the news in their mind, and note the sentence, words, phrases or ideas at the heart of the story. These notes will serve as the basis for constructing the headline.
We will try this technique with a simple hard news story.
Groups of Royal Marine Commandos came under heavy mortar and small arms fire in Steamer Point, Aden, today. One Marine was wounded as NLF guerrillas fired on six posts simultaneously.
We have now to write a headline for this. Strip away the secondary details and the articles and we can write down a sentence which sums up the news: ‘Royal Marine Commandos under heavy mortar and small arms fire in Aden today’. This is our sentence capturing the news. It is, of course, much too long for a headline. What can we cut out? Royal Marine Commandos can become ‘Marines’. The location in Aden can be dropped since stories on troops in Aden have been running through the news for weeks. We can omit ‘today’ because in a news context the reader takes it for granted the item is about current events.
So now we have ‘Marines under heavy mortar and small arms fire’. This may still be too long to fit in the space allocated. If we eliminate the description of the attack as ‘mortar and small arms’ we have a headline:
MARINES UNDER HEAVY FIRE
There may be room for further refinement. We can take out the word ‘heavy’ and put back the more specific word ‘mortar’. Mortar fire is, in any event, more significant than small arms fire:
MARINES UNDER MORTAR FIRE
This headline meets all the requirements: it fits; it makes immediate sense; it attracts readers; it tells the news.
How Many Ideas?
What we have just done is to write a headline by editing a sentence. That was a simple story and a simple one-line headline, but the same technique of sentence-editing serves for more elaborate stories and more elaborate headline structures. Let us write a headline now of three lines on the following story:
Teams of rescuers brought an injured woman of 25 to the surface at the Giant’s Pothole near Castleton in the Peak District of Derbyshire yesterday, after a perilous 14-hour struggle through icy water and narrow rocky passageways 450ft underground.
Caked in mud and swathed in a special insulation suit, Miss Donna Carr was carried from the hole at 5 a.m. by grimy-faced rescuers. She is believed to have a fractured skull and leg injuries after falling 30ft soon after entering the 1,317ft hole at 4 p.m. on Saturday. Last night, as she was reported fully conscious and fairly comfortable at Sheffield Royal Infirmary, some of the 50 rescue workers told of what they had done and of two heroes, Dr G. Kidd, and a nurse, Mrs Margaret Aldred.
We cannot cope with all these details in the headline. The woman’s age and the pothole’s location are secondary. Shorn of such secondary information, what is the core of the news? In a sentence it is: ‘A woman down a pothole has been rescued after 14 hours’. Leave out ‘14 hours’, ‘has been’ and the indefinite articles and we have a truncated sentence which becomes the headline, ‘Woman down pothole rescued’. This splits into three lines as:
WOMAN DOWN
POTHOLE
RESCUED
This fits easily, but is rather drab. It is also slow. We want to relay the news as quickly as possible. This structure delays until the third line the news that the woman has been saved. We should hasten to an earlier line the introduction of this news point. So for the first line let us write:
WOMAN SAVED
That truncated sentence leaves a lot of questions. In what circumstances? Where? This time when we answer these questions let us try to flesh the skeleton with something specific: ‘She has been saved after 14 hours down a pothole’. Delete the repetition and the indefinite articles and we have ‘after 14 hours down pothole’. This could be split as:
AFTER 14 HOURS
DOWN POTHOLE
The trouble now is that the second line won’t fit. Clearly rearranging the same wording on different lines does not help:
AFTER 14
HOURS IN POTHOLE
We have, therefore, to change the wording. Is there any other way we can express the same idea of 14 hours? Yes, there is. The woman spent the night in the pothole, so we can write:
WOMAN SAVED
AFTER NIGHT
IN POTHOLE
This is an adequate headline, but it would be improved if we could inject one detail of drama, something, say, about the icy water down there. We cannot do this with the existing line structure since the phrase ‘after icy night’ would be too long as a second line. If we are prepared to delay the core news point to the second line we can try:
WOMAN IN POTHOLE
SAVED AFTER
ICY NIGHT
Fine, but now the first line ‘Woman in pothole’ is too long. There is a device which will make it fit – a device which should be used sparingly, but which is legitimate and is accepted by the reader when it makes sense within the headline sentence. This is the device of the compound noun. ‘Woman in pothole’ becomes ‘pothole woman’:
POTHOLE WOMAN
SAVED AFTER
ICY NIGHT
Grammatical Traps
In each of these instances we have taken the core news point, expressed it in a sentence, shortened the sentence, and then simply transcribed the sentence, in the same order, into lines of headline. Where the words fell on the lines was determined simply by whether in that sequence they fitted the space available. If a newsy sentence has been edited comprehensibly there is no need to worry very much where the words fall. There is one caution, which I will give in a moment, but there is certainly no need for the fuss made by some newspapers in the United States. They insist on each line having its own grammatical integrity, and therefore ban headlines where, say, a preposition is on one line and the object is on another. Rules like this are a pedantry which has developed from one soundly based restriction on the word pattern in the multi-line headline. This simple real difficulty is one of meaning. There are a few occasions when you must watch the way the words fall between lines because this can change the meaning of a clear basic headline and the two-line headline of the same wording:
JUDGE GETS DRUNK DRIVING CASE
JUDGE GETS DRUNK
DRIVING CASE
That sort of split stands out as objectionable. Equally so if not as potentially costly are headlines where the writer splits hyphenated words:
‘MORE TIME’ CALL
FOR HELP-
JOBLESS SCHEME
Never split a hyphenated word; look for another way of saying the same thing without using a hyphen at all. There usually is one:
‘MORE TIME’ CALL
FOR SCHEME TO
HELP JOBLESS
Splitting a compound verb produces the effect of marching the reader in two different directions:
GUNMEN HOLD UP BANK
HEAVY TAXES WILL GO ON BEER, WINE
WILSON: SMITH RIGHT OFF COURSE
As a
general caution, then, never split compound verbs or compound nouns between lines. But the simplest test is to read each headline to oneself, pausing slightly at the end of each line. If there is awkwardness or doubt, rewrite. For instance, the text editor who wrote this one would have detected the trap by saying it:
VIETNAM VOTE: US
MIGHT WILL WIN
Impartiality
Accuracy and impartiality are the most important basic constituents of headlines. First, look at impartiality and ways of maintaining it. A news headline expresses the news, not the text editor’s views. Curiously, in five years of provincial editorship when I trained scores of sub-editors, this simple point was the one I never seemed able to put across. There were moments, it was true, when there was a certain arresting quality about the result: