12  Developing writing techniques

Put it before them briefly so they will read it, clearly so they will appreciate it, picturesquely so they will remember it and, above all, accurately so they will be guided by its light. (Joseph Pulitzer)

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once. (Cyril Connolly)

Journalists tend to sum up these attributes as readability. The sum of course is more than the parts. Sometimes you can see how it is done. ‘Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you’ (St Matthew, VII, vi). The anecdotes or metaphors of today’s journalists are akin to Christian parables, and if you need lessons in how to get a message moving there are few better places to look than the Bible in its Authorized Version.

Connolly reminds us that the priority for journalists must be immediate communication: simple and direct before vivid. All the other qualities must make the communication more effective. Writing that fails to fulfil its main purpose draws attention to the writer instead of to the content. It is often pompous or pretentious or self-conscious. The writer is either not clear about the content or is not sufficiently engaged with it. Fulfilling your commitment to content and audience is largely what this book is about. But this chapter gets in closer to the tricks of the writing trade.

Good writing is as simple, direct and picturesque as the content and audience require. Those three words sum up all the principles of good writing of all kinds listed by pundits throughout the ages. To picturesque Pulitzer adds the connotation memorable. In journalistic terms we might gloss this as attention grabbing and sustaining, vivid, assailing the senses, moving.

The classic guides to writing techniques are listed in the Bibliography (page 400). They include creative writers, editors, critics and journalists.

They range from Aristotle, through Schopenhauer and Maugham, to Gowers and Orwell, and the Americans William Strunk, E. B. White and Rudolph Flesch. The essentials are:

•  Choose the precise word

•  Be simple and concise

•  Prefer the familiar word to the unfamiliar

•  Use the concrete rather than the abstract

•  Avoid clichés

•  Be positive and honest

•  Write as you speak

•  Vary your pace and rhythm.

CHOOSE THE PRECISE WORD

Imprecise language follows from not thinking clearly. At its worst, it is gobbledygook, meaningless or unintelligible language, especially when over-technical or pompous. Here’s a sample:

In communicating these data to your organization after fullest consultation with all my colleagues also concerned, I would certainly be less than truthful if I were to say that this has occasioned the Ministry (and this section in particular) no little difficulty but that the delay is nevertheless regretted.

This comes from Sir Ernest Gowers’s classic The Complete Plain Words. Gowers points out that the writer intended to say something very simple: I am sorry we could not send the information sooner, but we have found this a very difficult case. But the sentence ends up with the meaning: the case was easy and the delay is not regretted. Gobbledygook is a disease of bureaucrats rather than journalists, but because it tends to fall foul of most of the principles of good writing we have to recognize it, and steer clear of it.

Precision takes time and thought, and we are often short of both. Then we tend to take the words and phrases lying conveniently on the storage shelves of our minds. Pairs of words that look like synonyms but are not can be a trap. ‘Alternatives’ is not the same as ‘choices’, nor do the following match up: ‘chronic’ and ‘acute’, ‘comprise’ and ‘compose’. On the other hand, you have to be on the alert for the way language is changing all the time. Dictionaries do not prescribe on but describe current usage and you have to accept that ‘disinterested’ can now have the meaning of ‘uninterested’ as well as ‘not influenced by considerations of personal advantage’ even though you wanted the two words to remain forever distinct.

Unnecessary adjectives and adverbs are the first words to be blue-pencilled out by subeditors. ‘The man is very big’ may sound as if you are anxious the reader won’t believe you when you say he’s big. They had an absolutely amazing day by the sea is used to mean that they quite enjoyed themselves rather than that they saw an Immaculate Conception rising to heaven. ‘Fantastic’ and ‘fabulous’ are similar gush words, devalued through overuse. Beware of trendy words that can be out of date by the time you get around to pinning them down.

Modifiers can bring precision, of course, when used appropriately. Arts reviewers need them. The arts reviews of the weeklies, for example, have to pack a lot in. Consider how neatly the background information about character and situation is encapsulated by the adjectives and adverbs in this extract from an Evening Standard review (28 January 2004) by Nicholas de Jongh of a play called I’m a Fool to Want You by Paul Hunter:

The bare stage boasts a back wall, from whose three exits characters keep popping, and onto which three chairs and a pair of red shoes are horizontally stuck. This design, Zoe Rahman’s jazzy piano music and Mark Crown’s trumpet improvisations all help shape the dream-struck, improvisatory atmosphere in which Stephen Harper’s dark-suited, moustachioed, deadpan Boris falls for his barber Ursula. Seductive Hayley Carmichael invests this latter role with her familiar mix of husky-voiced, waif-like exuberance and childish glee.

The great resourcefulness of English with the numerous synonyms, near-synonyms and different ways of saying things allows us to be precise if we avoid being complacent. We can, for example, choose the English ask, or the French-derived question, or the Latin-derived interrogate, to indicate different usages: ordinary, more formal and more restricted (e.g. professional). We can choose between freedom and liberty, answerable and responsible, lively and animated, depending on the context.

Use a thesaurus if you can’t think of the precise word you want. Then you will say cajole rather than ‘persuade by flattery or deceit’, hagiography rather than ‘writing about the lives of the saints’, a scowl for an ‘expression of extreme displeasure’, a sycophant for a ‘toadying hanger-on’. If you’re trying to remember the word that means the church caretaker and gravedigger but can’t think of a synonym the thesaurus and a straightforward dictionary won’t be much use. Your answer is in the Oxford Reverse Dictionary: sexton, to be found among the numerous terms under the headword ‘church’.

Clear and correct

That wealth of choices in English, however, brings its dangers. It’s easy to go wrong with punctuation, spelling, grammar, usage, connotations and registers. A comma missing from a steak flambé recipe can result in a house on fire. Computer spellchecks and grammarchecks are limited. Don’t expect a spellcheck to correct ‘She combed her hare into two plates’. A common grammar mistake is the misplaced participle: ‘Taking the baby into her arms, the bus was boarded with difficulty’ (say ‘she boarded’). The trouble with the muscular modern sentence is that it can become muscle-bound. To avoid heavy subsidiary clauses, economic phrases can be overburdened and fail to connect, as in ‘An avid theatregoer, she became one of the country’s top biologists’.

Usage can vary with different constructions. A sign in the window of an Indian restaurant said: ‘Once you’ve eaten here, you’ll recommend others’. A chemist sign said, ‘We dispense with accuracy’. The ambiguity pointed out, the chemist changed it to ‘We don’t dispense with accuracy’. The difference in meaning given to a verb when a preposition is added is a source of many traps.

Words change their connotations according to the company they keep. You’ll believe in a plausible theory but not in a plausible rogue. Admissible means worth considering in general parlance but when given the law register admissible evidence is much more specific: evidence that can be presented in court.

BE SIMPLE AND CONCISE

The second last paragraph of the draft of an article of mine on human rights needed attention:

Who doesn’t believe in human rights? They are, as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations proclaims, the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world. Amnesty concentrates on a clear, simple programme. It works for the release of prisoners of conscience, who have been deprived of liberty for political or religious beliefs, and who have not used or supported violence. Early and fair trials for all prisoners are demanded. And the death penalty, torture, and any cruel or degrading treatment are opposed in all circumstances.

Note how the rewrite improved the paragraph following the above principles:

In theory, who doesn’t believe in human rights? Are they not the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world? That’s how the United Nations puts it, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Amnesty concentrates on working for the release of prisoners of conscience – those deprived of liberty for political or religious beliefs who have not used or supported violence. Amnesty demands early and fair trials for all prisoners, and it opposes the death penalty, torture, and any cruel or degrading treatment, in all circumstances.

Simplicity, directness and the resulting clarity will result from:

1  Keeping to the same subject as far as possible. Don’t change the subject too often.

2  Putting the meaning where possible into active verbs rather than in passive ones or in abstract nouns.

3  Keeping subject and verb near each other.

When editing your piece, also look for:

1  The irrelevant, the digressions, the self-indulgent writing that you’re proud of (‘murder your darlings’).

2  The superfluous modifiers.

3  Circumlocutions and tautologies.

Examples

1  Your 800-word travel piece about the delights of Viennese restaurants today has 200 words on Mozart’s eating habits. You found some fascinating material on the subject during your research. Cut the paragraphs out or reduce to a couple of sentences. You may find another place for the material.

2  Superfluous adverbs can hamper a verb’s performance. ‘Predictably, his failure to put in the effort needed caused him to fail’ and ‘Basically, I criticized the council’s handling of the problem’ try with those adverbs to be extra thoughtful. A second thought would have removed them, and also these – quite perfect, actually quite perfect, totally ridiculous, and so on.

Superfluous adjectives likewise: ‘the true facts’, ‘an acute crisis’, ‘the prerequisite conditions’, ‘under active consideration’. Instead of adding impact these undervalue the nouns. The following earn their keep: ‘a damaging lie’, ‘a lamentable conclusion’, ‘the hidden facts’.

Put the meaning into the verbs and take your story forward more quickly. Use:

stagger, lurch or wobble rather than ‘walk with an unsteady gait’
condemn rather than ‘expressed complete disapproval of ’
alluded to rather than ‘made an allusion to’
ignored rather than ‘paid no attention to’

3  Circumlocutions – talking round the subject – can similarly be avoided by finding the right word. Use:

ruined rather than ‘in a ruined condition’
except rather than ‘with the exception of’
in adult education rather than ‘in adult education situations’.

Use short words rather than long, if they mean the same thing: why say ‘implement’ if you mean do? Prefer buy to ‘purchase’, live to ‘reside’, only to ‘exclusively’.

Tautology is unnecessary repetition. ‘The row of camels had disappeared’ is enough, without ‘from view’.

The popular papers have no space to be wordy. Positive active verbs achieve conciseness in this story from The Star:

A hero was blasted to death when he tackled an armed robber yesterday. The middle-aged partner in a mortgage brokers challenged the raider when he demanded cash. A scuffle broke out, a shot was fired and Christopher Nugent fell dying in a pool of his own blood.

Mr Nugent tackled the gunman in his offices in Mildenhall, Suffolk, after being alerted by a terrified assistant.

After the shooting the man raced from the offices and leapt into a waiting car which sped off …

Such action-packed prose works well if the story is short. The hunt for synonyms – for, say, ‘moving fast’, ‘fled’, ‘whisked’, ‘swooped’– can become frenetic in longer pieces and then they become popular paper clichés. (See below.)

Sentences average 18 to 20 words in the popular papers. In the qualities they can grow longer, but simplicity is maintained by the same basic structure of subject, verb, object, as in this Guardian intro:

Saddam Hussein is reputed to be a big Shakespeare fan. He particularly likes The Taming of the Shrew and, more oddly, Romeo and Juliet. For some reason, the ex-dictator believes the tale of the star-crossed lovers teaches children obedience to nation and family.

PREFER THE FAMILIAR WORD TO THE UNFAMILIAR

The commonest kinds of unfamiliar language are foreign words and jargon. Foreign borrowings that have become familiar, such as croquet, gringo (Spanish American for a foreigner, especially English-speaking) and milieu are usually printed without italics. The less familiar (foreignisms) are usually in italics: as with the French a huis clos (in private) and mesalliance (marriage with a person of a lower social position), the Spanish manana (literally tomorrow: in the indefinite future) and the German Bildungsroman (a novel dealing with a person’s early life and development). The Oxford Writers’ Dictionary gives general advice on such matters. To get right up to date, though, you may have to check with house style.

You may want to use a foreign borrowing, usually French, when there’s no English equivalent. A review of a book about an Italian football club with rowdy fans in The Sunday Times refers to the author ‘as if seized by some strange nostalgie de la boue bringing those fans to life’. The review doesn’t explain that the French phrase means literally ‘yearning for mud’, in other words a desire for degradation and depravity, although the context makes it fairly clear. Somehow the French gets it just right while the English of it doesn’t sound right at all. But you can’t use such foreignisms downmarket.

You have to judge whether such words or phrases need translation, and your decision doesn’t entirely depend on whether there are italics or not. A Spectator review of a book about courtesans (no italics needed) in New Statesman refers to a ‘grisette’, which has no italics but is nevertheless translated: ‘a seamstress in poor, grey cotton’. In the same review the italicized demi-mondaine is not translated.

If there is a good English word or expression equivalent to your foreignism, the latter betrays pretentiousness. For de haut en bas, ‘condescendingly’ or ‘patronizingly’ will serve. Weltmacht makes you sound deeply cultivated, but (do you mind?) it only means world power. The Spectator especially and New Statesman and the Sunday qualities in the review pages are very fond of foreignisms.

Jargon is ‘words or expressions used by a particular profession or group that are difficult for others to understand’. All the professions and occupations have their own jargon. Journalists who write about technology or science have to translate the jargon of the experts, and judge how much translation is required in a particular publication.

There is former slang that, emanating from Silicone Valley, used to signal high-tech credentials, such as interface, user-friendly and input. They are now as likely to be talking about sandwiches, and why not? Read-only memory can refer to a person who never learns anything.

Why jargon has almost become a dirty word is that it has invaded the language of some groups and turned it into gobbledygook, or something close to it. The piling up of abstract nouns is common in the pretentious kind of gobbledygook that Private Eye lampoons in its Pseuds’ Corner. Many of the extracts are journalism – a piece, for example, about a young woman haunted by the shame of cooking badly says she is not alone:

According to a new report, the fear of such a kitchen crisis can cause mental blocks, nausea, headaches and difficulty in breathing; all symptoms of a newly identified disorder dubbed kitchen performance anxiety syndrome.

Avoid ‘environment phrases’: a ‘friendly, enthusiastic and cooperative working environment’ is better known as an office.

Slang

Slang is informal language more common in speech than in writing. As long as you’re sure that you are on the same wavelength as a well-defined audience, slang can be a lively way of addressing it. Its origins are generally among the low-life and rebellious, on the street. Much of it is vulgar. There’s schoolboy slang and criminals’ slang, and druggies’ slang.

Like straightforward jargon slang can be a concise way of getting across the character of a person or a group, so it is sometimes needed when reviewing. A book review in The Observer refers to a novelist’s style as ‘ditsy’ (with the quotes), adding that she ‘manages to drive her six-in-hand at a cracking pace’ by way of explaining the term. Jonathan Green’s monumental Dictionary of Jargon tells us that it meant ‘wonderful’ in the USA in the 1970s and then came to mean fussy, intricate, and then, ‘esp. of women, scatterbrained’. Not fair, is it?

You have to use it in the right context, or it’s pretentious, and unless it’s vital for your purpose, and needs explaining, you shouldn’t have to explain it.

There’s slang that lasts because it’s vivid or funny. ‘To have a guest in the attic’ means to be insane. ‘Hang someone out to dry’, ‘sailing close to the wind’ and ‘letting your hair down’: can’t do without, or becoming clichés? – you decide. Slang has to be used in moderation and mainly in conversation. You risk ridicule if you overdo it in your writing and rejection if you don’t keep up with what’s in and what’s out and what changed in meaning.

A Loaded feature about playing elephant polo in India which required the writer Graham Wray and photographer Dan White to hole up in a five-star hotel mixes their twenty-something argot with that of the more posh variety typical of the Raj:

As luck would have it, the previous guests in our particular room had been Kate Moss and Christy Turlington, who’d been here on a fashion shoot. A quick recce under the bed for any misplaced scanties proved fruitless so, free from other distractions, we immediately hit the bar. Two hours on the juice and we’re all getting along spiffingly. The aforementioned Gurkha officer even seems like a decent sort. Turns out his son reads Loaded. ‘Yah, bloody good mag. Got some balls. Not my sort of malarkey, you understand. Young person’s caper.’ Turns out it’s his birthday, so we duly get the champers in. Two glasses later and the old boy’s completely plastered.

USE THE CONCRETE RATHER THAN THE ABSTRACT

That means bringing people into it rather than theorizing, being specific as well as general, giving figures as well as facts. We’ve already mentioned the need to ask those basic reporting questions when exploring any subject: who, what, where, when, why and how.

Picturesqueness and memorability are achieved by leaving the reader thought-provoked or wiser or happier. Few features can do this if they don’t relate to people in some way. Photographic or graphic illustrations, case studies, anecdotes, quotations or quotes, as we’ve seen, will help to do this.

Social problems, the tragedies of war, the triumphs to inspire have little impact for most readers in the form of abstract exposition and argument. The mind can be well engaged by an essay, but emotional involvement is needed if the newspaper or magazine reader’s attention is to be captured. There must be a protagonist or victim to identify with or sympathize with. The plight of the civilian victims of the war against Iraq was iconized by stories of such victims as the 12-year-old boy who lost both his arms.

Laurie Lee, travelling in Spain, assails us through all the five senses. Here is a sample, from As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning:

In the village square I came on a great studded door bearing the sign: ‘Posada de Nuestra Senora’. I pushed the door open and entered a whitewashed courtyard hanging with geraniums and crowded with mules and asses. There was bedlam in the courtyard – mules stamping, asses braying, chickens cackling and children fighting. A fat old crone, crouching by the fire in the corner, was stirring soup in a large black cauldron, and as she seemed to be in charge, I went up to her and asked for food. Without a word she lifted a ladleful of the soup and held it to my mouth. I tasted and choked: it was hot, strong and acrid with smoke and herbs. The old lady peered at me sharply through the fumes of the fire. She was bent, leather-skinned, bearded and fanged, and looked like a watchful moose.

We feel we are there, and the effect is assured by the pattern made by the shifting viewpoint as the author walks, from general picture (whitewashed courtyard) to particular detail (bearded and fanged woman).

Make sure your metaphors are still alive. ‘Neither cast your pearls before swine’was brilliant when St Matthew first came out with it, but that was a long time ago. You can still use it, with attribution, as I have, or you might find a context where using it without quotes will be apt, assuming your readers will know its origin; in this way you can use any famous quotation.

Learn how to use figurative language from the great satirists, from Voltaire and Swift (who suggested various ways children could be cooked in Ireland as part of the solution to famine there) to today’s disciples. Irony is their sharpest weapon.

AVOID CLICHÉS

An occasional cliché has its place, like waving to someone as you turn the corner of the street.

Many clichés are metaphors that are in their last stages of life, or that died some time ago. ‘Grist to the mill’, ‘ring the changes on’, ‘no stone unturned’, ‘play into the hands of’ and ‘keen as mustard’ have not yet been buried. They are so easy to slot into any story. To ring the changes on such expressions, you have to be as keen as mustard and leave no stone unturned in the effort, otherwise you’re playing into the hands of … I’m sorry, I’ve lost the track….

The particular clichés that journalists are prone to are designated journalese and reporters offend more often than feature writers. They generally have less space and less time to produce, so more excuse. The report of a house on fire in a local paper uses the clichés of the popular nationals and can be a template for the tyro reporter.

It might go something like this:

A family of six cheated death by minutes as a fierce blaze roared through their semi in leafy Laburnum Avenue yesterday. Horrified neighbours looked on shocked and helpless as the house was gutted.

While police probe the origins of the fire, neighbours lauded John and Mandy, the fearless dad and mum-to-be. They had snatched their tots, aged between two and seven, out of their beds and through the flames.

The grief-stricken family are now housed with relatives in nearby Middenminster. In a bid to stem the increase of fires in the area, the overstretched fire service is to launch a recruiting campaign. The tragedy has alerted the town to the need for a major rethink about fire precautions and for radical and far-reaching solutions.

Those buzz words of the popular press – ‘blast’, ‘probe’, ‘snatched’, ‘bid’, ‘stem’ and so on – were seized for catchy headlines and then infiltrated the texts underneath where more restraint is required. The sort of report given above may well be exaggerated, given more drama and colour than it deserves, because there are a few other papers covering the area to compete with.

‘Radical and far-reaching solutions’ is the sort of phrase you might find in any report or feature, especially when no space has been found to work out what the solutions might be. Meanwhile, upmarket ‘phenomenon’, ‘inexorably’ and ‘parameters’ are being done to death, while misfortunes, presumably, will come in ‘a rash’ and demands will come in ‘choruses’ for some time to come. Events often come ‘in waves’ and ‘trends’, profits or losses ‘rocketing’ or ‘plummeting’, and numerous expectations and anxieties are usually ‘increasing’. There is the same need to upstage competitors.

You can extract humour by sending up clichés and jargon, as Private Eye does in its Clichewatch section. Under the heading ‘The Neophiliacs’ we were given samples from mainly national papers:

Cricket’s mass-marketing is long overdue. The premise that the sport of gentlemen can become the new rock ’n’ roll is entirely plausible.

Art … the new rock ’n’ roll.
Nigella has made cooking the new sex.

The trendsetters were all drinking vodka mixed with fizzy pop or cranberry juice … Cranberry is the new black.

Staying in seems to be the new going out.

Geometric prints may be the new black for the fashionistas of Paris, but May is the new August for French workers.

Going out is the new going out.

Fashion: Small is the New Big.

BE POSITIVE AND HONEST

To keep your readers you’ve got to have colour of some kind, even for the most factual piece. If there’s no drama in your theme you look for some degree of significance to make it rise above the ordinary. That’s what journalism is all about. You cannot merely list the facts, you’ve got to find the story in them, and that word ‘story’ suggests what the dangers are.

You’re going to make your piece as interesting as possible. It’s a well-established convention, and you have to assume that your readers will go along with it. But there is a line to draw. The fire report was an example of how you can overstep the line and such exaggerations can easily be recognized for what they are.

The following examples of being economical with the truth (forgive me) are more subtle and are of two kinds:

1  Implying more significance than is warranted by the facts, as in buzz words and fuzz words (tenuous links).

2  Evading facts that embarrass, as in euphemisms and political correctness.

Buzz and fuzz

We’ve already hit on buzz words above. They are clichés, but of the special kind called journalese or hackery, so they get another mention here. The qualities share some of the populars’ monosyllabic buzz words: politicians ‘rise and fall’ and there are ‘splits’ and ‘spins’.

Qualities have their own species of journalese. Such phrases as ‘growing concern’, ‘growing speculation’ and ‘sources close to the Prime Minister’ are needed when the civil servant or press secretary or whistleblower doesn’t want to be identified. These are acceptable as long as the reader is not being given spurious rumour dressed up as fact. Nicholas Bagnall’s Newspaper Language covers this subject fairly extensively.

‘Fuzz’ is when you imply linkage between facts and events when there is no link, or at best a tenuous one. It is understandable: how otherwise do you make a pattern, shape a story, out of the avalanche of events? Matthew Parris, as political sketch writer for The Times, once spelt out how this works (especially in writing about politics):

The simplest way is to state a chronological relationship between events, and to imply by this a causal one but without stating it. ‘After a series of embarrassing attacks on his leadership, Tony Blair yesterday sought to regain the initiative in a speech …’

Parris points out that the words ‘after’, ‘series’, ‘embarrassing’ and ‘regain’ suggest links that may not exist. He ends by conceding that a political journalist probably has to use these devices but that readers should be aware of them.

Euphemisms and political correctness

Euphemisms are expressions that use mild or less direct words when referring to something unpleasant or embarrassing. They can be harmless and can raise a smile. English, naturally enough, is full of them. We’re aware of the fact and send ourselves up by coining funny ones, such as ‘follically challenged’ for bald, ‘altitudinally challenged’ for short, and ‘orthographically challenged’ for ‘can’t spell’.

Most euphemisms are straight-faced, at least at the producer end. Many have been born as US spacespeak, where ‘a benign environment’ means safe, ‘a dynamic environment’ means dangerous and ‘latch integrity’means the door’s shut. Well they did anyway.

Some euphemisms, though, can be sinister, calculated to deceive, and can degenerate into gobbledygook. As Mark Twain said, ‘to a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail’. In 1987 Israel authorized the use of ‘moderate physical pressure’, which covered shaking, cold showers and sleep deprivation ‘in exceptional circumstances’. In 1999 an Israeli human rights group successfully challenged in court the way the General Security Services interpreted this authorization. It was found that 85 per cent of Arabs arrested each year were given the treatment, including many never charged with a crime. Ten detainees had died from the mistreatment.

Such is the power of the euphemism. More recently Guantanamo Bay and the Blair War Cabinet have spawned a few more. There are sinister euphemisms among stock phrases – attempts to prevent other people from worrying too much – such as ‘pacification’, ‘population control’ and so on. Apparently ‘collateral counterforce damage of second strike capability’ means 70 million dead. Note that string of foggy nouns again.

A lie can be called ‘an inoperative statement’ (USA) or ‘an economical use of truth’ (Britain). More tongue-in-cheek, no doubt, an American journalist asked about a call-girl who slept with diplomats: ‘Did she horizontalize her way to the information?’ Are ‘horizontalization’ and ‘horizontalizationize’ on their way?

Political correctness (PC) is the kind of euphemism that attempts to avoid upsetting people by language that might sound discriminatory. Often one welcomes a reminder of what the PC term is, so: disabled please (not ‘crippled’, to which the dictionary gives the registers archaic or offensive), Down syndrome (not ‘Mongoloid’, offensive); these are a matter of good manners. It good to see off the racists by insisting on Blacks rather than ‘nignogs’. Guidelines are set by local councils and other organizations, especially in the public sector.

The extensive litany of PC language, however, has gathered numerous weasel words and expressions designed to discourage thought. When workers become redundant the company can call it ‘downsizing’ and losses can be called ‘negative profits’. Waste tips sound better as ‘civic amenity centres’. Your disagreement with your company or your party policy can be politely ignored by labelling it ‘partisan’ or ‘divisive’ or ‘inappropriate’.

Such devalued currency turns up everywhere. Fairy tales are rewritten in case the animals in them are upset. A script for Prokoviev’s musical setting for Peter and the Wolf has the wolf being freed into the wild at the end instead of being put in a zoo. Exam authorities have planned to replace F for Fail with N for Nearly, and crowd control is sometimes referred to as ‘visitor flow management’.

Wrongs are not righted and lies may be allowed to breed by evasions. Sometimes you need to identify the perpetrators by being offensive.

Sexist language has largely been replaced. ‘Man’s achievements’ has become ‘human achievements’ and so on. But to replace the old tendency to use male nouns and pronouns, when the content refers to both sexes, with female nouns and pronouns seems to me to be absurd. Example: ‘If a client complains, she is immediately listened to.’

There are better solutions:

‘If a client complains, they are …’ (‘they’ used as a singular, nonspecific sex)
‘If clients … they are …’
‘If a client …, immediate attention is given …’

WRITE AS YOU SPEAK

Well, not exactly. You’ve no doubt taped interviews, and you’ve watched and listened to live broadcasts. You wouldn’t want to put all those ‘ers’ and ‘ums’ into writing, or the repetitions, hesitations and infelicities. A piece of writing is expected to be in much better order than your normal conversation and with the qualities outlined above. But the injunction to write as you speak warns you to write as naturally as possible and to avoid, in particular, egotism, pomposity, preachiness and ostentation. Avoid this sort of thing:

I was idly noticing the negligible effect of the adan upon the occupants of the neighbouring shops when suddenly my errant attention became arrested. A mendicant of unwholesome aspect crouched in the shadow of the narrow gateway.

So begins a story about Egypt. If you carry on like that you’ll be arrested too.

No doubt the people you talk to put a damper on any egotistic tendency you may have. It’s all too easy for the tendency to reappear when you write: there’s nobody staying your hand. A feature based on personal experience may require you to be the protagonist, but don’t assume every one of your thoughts and actions are of interest to your readers because they interest you. Keep the first person to the minimum. How the army of personal columnists sustain interest (or try to) is the subject of another chapter.

Don’t prefix what you want to say with pompous impersonal statements such as ‘It’s important to keep in mind that …’ or ‘it’s not generally realized that …’. Avoid preaching. ‘While the British public remains indifferent to the litter-infested streets, nothing will be done about it’, presumably insults most of your readers. Include yourself in the complaint.

VARY YOUR PACE AND RHYTHM

However interesting your content, if your pace doesn’t vary and your rhythm is monotonous you will lose your readers’ attention. These variations should become instinctive. If you need help, study the features that ‘read short’ rather than long and work out how it’s achieved.

Two suggestions:

1  Consider varying the pace as you switch from intro to body and again to ending. A brisk intro may be compelling. The body may need to slow down for description, explanation, argument, expansion with supporting material. Then, perhaps, the pace needs to speed up again as the article gets into the homeward stretch.

2  Vary the lengths and rhythms of words, sentences and paragraphs to reflect the variations in content and to avoid monotony. Occasionally reverse the normal orders. Put the subject at the end, use a few passives.

Here’s a paragraph with variations, from an Observer column by Francis Wheen, having fun with the sociological stereotype of Middle England which spawned acres of newsprint in the mid 1990s. He has been running, for some years, he says, a little known seat of learning … Formerly the Central English Poly, it now rejoices in the title of the University of Middle England.

Our curriculum is small and carefully designed. Physics lessons stop well short of chaos theory (far too upsetting a concept for our sensitive undergraduates). In History, the only set books are those of Sir Arthur Bryant, though we do sometimes allow students to refer to Winston Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples. The Philosophy course is built around the works of Patience Strong. No foreign languages are studied. To those who ask, ‘What should they know of England that only England know?’ we reply: quite enough, thank you. Our core subject, as you would expect, is English freed of the continental theory that so disfigures the discipline in other universities. The syllabus includes all the immortals of our native literature, with special papers on Sir Henry Newbolt (rake he in his hammock till the great Armadas come/Capten, art tha sleepin there below?) and Sir John Betjeman. Our flourishing Dramatic Society performs one Shakespeare play and one Savoy Opera every term. We award only secondhand degrees, since our motto is ‘Moderation in All Things’.

R. L. Stevenson, revered as a great stylist, said, ‘I wonder if I shall ever learn to write.’ You will find me guilty of some of the faults criticized in this chapter. That, of course, will help you to avoid them. Columnists often send up in their columns the lapses of their rivals, their colleagues, sometimes of themselves.

Making it final

Before your final version, put the latest draft of your article aside for an hour or two, or a day or two if you have the time. It will then be easier to read it with the eyes of an editor, freshly and objectively. Read it more than once, concentrating on particular aspects.

Checklist

1  Is the overall purpose/theme/idea and audience clear? (Why did you write the article? What did you hope to achieve by it? Was it effectively communicated to the readers you had in mind?) Did you digress confusingly from the original idea? Is it now too vague?

2  Is the content adequate for the purpose? Is it significant enough? Was some information inaccessible? Did you manage to replace it?

3  Does the structure match the idea and the content? Is there good, clear linkage? Does it pass the readability test for interest, directness, pace and linkage?

4  Is the style appropriate for the audience? Does it pass the readability test for interest, directness and pace?