Even in the reporting on schools, a subject close to so many readers, pedagogues’ jargon oozes into print. Yet often they get stuck in the viscous verbiage of their sources. Reporters are obligated to translate gobbledygook into plain English. (Another is journalese, our own tribal dialect, which is the subject of a later chapter.) News writers are professionally exposed to language bloat, jargons pumped into the atmosphere by official news sources and communicators in the bureaucracy, the professions, institutions and corporations. These are the problems that, in our limited finitude, we create for ourselves. Ten words saved.Īnd nearly inscrutable: Yet, he said, humans oddly realize their limited finitude, and by the very fact that they do, transcend it in awareness of some further being of potential infinity. In his better moments, the writer would say, … dictate that you keep the upper hand. That would have been … despite rising congressional opposition, if the writer had stayed awake.Įven stranger: Good military and business strategy dictate avoidance of any action that places one in a position where others can call the shots. Swollen sentences heave into view: The administration is going ahead despite the fact that opposition in Congress is rising. Contemplate ongoing or currently, as in he is currently the president of…, where the verb already expresses the sense of the adjective.
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Start with such tiny clutter as the up in free up or head up. We fudge the small, measured steps, the care for details, that craftsmanship demands.Īnd so it happens that a portion of the news report is like a river in flood, sweeping along a great many things that shouldn’t be there: trees, drowned raccoons, front porches, old shoes. We usually lapse from inattention, not ignorance. To write well takes a high level of technical awareness. To be good takes a high level of moral awareness. To write well is as difficult as being good, said Somerset Maugham. Reporters know they should write simply and strip clutter from their prose. This clearly suggests that something outside the deadline process is at work. And a far more curious fact emerges from a study of news writing in many places: Stories written at relative ease show much the same flaws as those written under pressure. How much quality writing can you expect under such conditions?īut granting a measure of endemic disorder in the news business, which includes an ever-growing list of responsibilities and distractions, it’s also true that much excellent copy is being written daily. But news is perishable, deadlines glare, resources are finite, big stories break unannounced-the pulse of daily journalism keeps racing. News writing should be clear, concise, accurate and interesting. Chapter 1 Language: Pompous, Pedantic and Plain
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