English for Journalists

Twentieth Anniversary Edition

Wynford Hicks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135012724
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Grammar & Punctuation
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

English for Journalists has established itself as an invaluable guide to the basics of English in newsrooms the world over, focusing on the essential aspects of writing, from reporting speech to the house styles and jargon central to the language of journalism.

Written in a highly accessible and engaging style, English for Journalists covers the fundamentals of grammar, spelling, punctuation and journalistic writing, with all points illustrated through a series of concise and illuminating examples. The book features practical, easy to follow rules, the correct and incorrect ways to report stories, and examples of common mistakes and problem words in journalistic writing.

The twentieth anniversary edition adds a new introduction to the work from author Wynford Hicks, as well as updated examples throughout to improve accessibility, and a revised first chapter on the state of English today. This is an essential guide to written English for all practicing journalists and students of journalism today.

1

What kind of English?

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The first edition of this book gave some simple advice: ‘Write for your reader; use a clear form of English, avoiding jargon, slang, pomposity, academic complexity, obscurity …’

It pointed out that modern English has a rich and varied history and it noted: ‘The strongest influence on the way we speak and write is undoubtedly American. In the global village of satellites and computers it is in American rather than English that nation speaks unto nation.’ Twenty years later, in a media world where the technology changes every five minutes, that looks like an understatement.

But something else is obviously going on as well.

‘OMG!’

Under the headline ‘OMG, Cupid — this is the written word’s golden age’ Mark Forsyth reassured Sunday Times readers who thought that social media were undermining literacy. Not at all, he said — in fact the opposite was true. And a few weeks later the Daily Mail had a similar message:

OMG! Txts make u gd at writing? Srsly?

How “text speak” can help pupils write essays

A study for the Department of Education had ‘found no evidence that a child’s development in written language was disrupted by using text abbreviations’. On the contrary, there seemed to be a positive relationship between texting and the ability to read and spell. This could be because texters needed to understand sound structures and syllables in words.

As background the Mail added that the number of fixed-line phone calls continued to fall and that mobile phone calls were now falling as well, while the number of texts was way up (150 billion in 2011, compared with 50 billion five years before).

In his more personal piece Forsyth described growing up in the 1980s when his generation ‘communicated by phone and watched television. I never wrote a single word to anybody of my own age, except perhaps to pass notes in class.’ But nowadays young people were exposed to a torrent of the written word — text messages, internet chatrooms, Facebook updates, tweets …

This, he said, was having a big impact on all sorts of things — particularly online dating. The OkCupid site had reported that misspellings reduce your chances of a date more than anything else. People agonise over their profiles and are irritated when others don’t. One of Forsyth’s friends objected to the greeting ‘Hi Hun’ because, as she put it, she wasn’t German.

Forsyth made the point that while the internet provides all sorts of examples of dreadful English it also features corrections from people (popularly known as ‘grammar Nazis’) who insist on pointing out the mistakes. In some cases professional — that is, paid — journalists have been criticised by non-professionals posting comments which ridicule not only their views but their grammar and punctuation. The Twitter account @YourinAmerica set up in November 2012 offering ‘concise lessons in the use of your versus you’re’ gained 12,000 followers in less than a week.

Forsyth claimed that there’s ‘probably never been a time in history when writing was so universal and so important’. Certainly, the ‘decay of language’, which we have been warned about all our lives, no longer seems to be a threat. But the fact that more people want to write well and spend more time writing — particularly in English — doesn’t of itself solve all our problems.

‘Britishisms’

Some say the American-British exchange is a two-way process. Indeed there have been complaints from academic linguists in the United States that British idioms are becoming too popular over there. Geoffrey Nunberg of the University of California at Berkeley has been quoted as saying: ‘Spot on — it’s just ludicrous. You are just impersonating an Englishman when you say spot on. Will do — I hear that from Americans. That should be put into quarantine.’

Other ‘Britishisms’ that have been recorded recently are: sell-by date, go missing and chat up. Just as James Bond and the Beatles invaded the United States in the 1960s, Harry Potter has been waving his magic wand there since 1998 so ginger has now become a fashionable American word to describe red hair. It slipped through the ruthless American editing process of the Harry Potter books that made every dustbin a trashcan,every jumper a sweater and every torch a flashlight. Even the title of the first one,Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, was considered too difficult for young American readers, who had to have philosopher changed to sorcerer.

Now she has the clout J. K. Rowling has had the original title restored. But the American editions of the books as a whole still include extensive translations of ‘Britishisms’ (the lists are easily found on the internet).

American spelling …

The trend on the internet is clear: American spellings are becoming more common as software defaults to the American form and often fails to recognise the British one. As one poster replied after having his furor corrected to furore: ‘I know! I originally had furore but the American spell check built into Chrome suggested furor, which appears to be their term for the same thing.’

British journalists working for media in general rather than employed by a single outlet used to call themselves freelances; now they tend to be ‘freelancers’.

Except among extra-careful writers the British distinction between licence/practice as nouns and license/practise as verbs is getting lost (the Americans prefer license with an s for both noun and verb and practice with a c for both noun and verb). Election information for the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society produced by the (British) Electoral Reform Services Ltd in December 2012 had license with an s used as a noun in the small print. Many British people follow American practice when they write informally.

On-ise/-ize there is no clear pattern. American practice favours -ize while in Britain the trend has been away from it. The Times, which used to be the only national newspaper loyal to -ize, abandoned it in 1992 while in the same year the Geneva-based International Labour Organisation went the other way and adopted -ize, thus changing the spelling of its own name. The European Union prefers -ise.

Several American variants, such as airplane (for aeroplane), program (for programme) and fetus (for foetus), are increasingly common in British English — see p70.

Another increasingly common variant — dwarves for dwarfs — which may or may not look American certainly isn’t. The famous Walt Disney film (1937) was called Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It’s J. R. R. Tolkien, whose first fantasy book, The Hobbit, also came out in 1937, who’s responsible for the popularisation of ‘dwarves’ (which he called ‘a piece of private bad grammar’); he adopted it to distance his fantasy from the real world. So ‘dwarves’ should be restricted to fantasy, keeping elves company.

… and grammar

The most noticeable difference between British and American grammar is in the use of prepositions. For example, American kids get to be on the team if selected whereas the British are in it. They usually play on weekends whereas the British play at weekends. If there’s no football/ soccer field available they have to play on the street whereas the British play in the street …

Here American usage is increasingly dominant. Google the phrase ‘word on the street’ and what do you get? ‘Word on the Street is an exciting new English language teaching programme co-produced by the BBC and the British Council.’ Over on ITV the script for that posh historical soap about the upper classes and their underlings Downton Abbey was said to include a London jazz club ‘on’ as opposed to ‘in’ Greek Street, Soho.

But elsewhere in grammar there isn’t much difference between the two versions of English — at least as far as recommendations are concerned. In That or Which, and Why (Routledge, 2007) Evan Jenkins, a columnist on language for the Columbia Journalism Review, made a number of points familiar to British readers. He acknowledged that the British are more relaxed than the Americans about the traditional that/which rule (see pp28–9) and concluded:

The that/which rule is arbitrary and overly subtle and ought to be done away with. It is without intrinsic sense, but as long as large numbers of teachers and editors insist on it, we do well to understand it.

Fragments

On the subject of grammar … as writing in general — and journalism in particular — has become increasingly informal and colloquial, there is confusion about the most fundamental point of all. What’s a sentence — and does it matter?

The first edition of English for Journalists followed A Journalist’s Guide and said: ‘A sentence is a group of words expressing a complete thought.’ The second edition (1998) added a dictionary definition — ‘a piece of writing or speech between two full stops or equivalent pauses’ — and stressed that a single word could be a sentence.

The Guide’s original discussion of sentences advised that incomplete ones (fragments) should be used ‘very sparingly and in the right place’; journalists should avoid writing like ‘the chatty columnist’.

But good columnists have always had a big influence on the way newcomers aspired to write. For 30 years or so from 1935 the Daily Mirror’s Bill Connor (Cassandra) broke many of the ‘rules’ of writing that were being drummed into the heads of schoolchildren, certainly the silly ban on ‘and’ to start sentences — but above all the one about sentences needing a subject and a verb:

I suppose I was mortally afraid of Mr Beulah for the best part of five years.

Dead scared.

And especially so at this, the third week in September …

Other iconoclastic columnists celebrated for their style were Connor’s successor at the Mirror, Keith Waterhouse (who later moved to the Daily Mail), and Bernard Levin who was famous for his long and complex (but beautifully constructed) sentences. Levin once returned to his berth at the Times after a few years away with a ‘sentence’ of three words: ‘And another thing.’

So the fragment is nothing new. But now it’s everywhere — for example in a feature on ‘our paedophile culture’ in the London Review of Books: ‘At the BBC these people became like gods. Even the weird ones. Even the ones who everybody could tell were deranged …’

So is there a problem? Not in principle, not any more. But there are still some points worth making — see pp48–9.

Meaning

It may irritate some people to hear British politicians describe themselves as ‘stepping up to the plate in the upcoming elections’ where once they might have gone out to bat in the forthcoming ones but the meaning of most Americanisms is clear. Most but not all: what does ‘you’re batting zero for two’ mean, for example? And why is the phrase ‘a red-headed stepchild’ used as an insult?^*

Meaning is key here. The ground floor in Britain is the first floor in the US; to bathe in the US is to have a bath in Britain (traditional Britons bathe in the sea in bathing suits); homely means friendly or kindly in Britain, plain or even ugly in the US. ‘I’m not on the homely side’ could mean ‘I’m pretty hot really’. So it’s not something to be confused about when writing or reading an online dating profile.

Nowadays even the best educated and most sophisticated people are under extreme pressure to keep up. In December 2012 Mary Beard (Cambridge classics professor, Times Literary Supplement columnist and TV historian) ended her blog on a carol concert by asking: ‘What actually does “no crib for a bed” mean?’ The replies she got were generally scornful. One of the more polite ones was: ‘I remember thinking about this when I was about five and working it out for myself.’^**

‘You’re welcome’

Another way of looking at British versus American is through the eyes of foreigners. What do the French or the Chinese make of these two versions of English? Do they spot the differences?

Books and leaflets aimed at French speakers learning English have traditionally used visual clichés like the union jack, rain and Big Ben to make the British connection explicit. A recent booklet (L’anglais correct, First Editions, Paris, 2012) has a front cover showing a bowler-hatted Briton offering his umbrella to a rather wet woman who, quite correctly, says: ‘Thank you!’

Bowler hat then see...