aims | guiding principles | metaphors | short words | unnecessary words |
use words with care | 'indish' expressions | active not passive | jargon | other

Aims
The basic principles of news journalism are simple: give readers the facts of a story in a straightforward, concise and engaging form.

Even with standout headlines and large pictures, there is usually enough space for the text in a news publication. But writers and sub-editors have to ensure that the space is used judiciously, and that essential facts are told with an urgency and brevity which grabs the reader's attention and keeps his interest to the end.

If the subject of the story is complicated, it is important to explain it in a simple and logical way. A confused reader who finds a story difficult to understand will stop reading it. If this happens too often in the same paper, he will stop buying it.

Guiding principles
If the subject matter of an article is strong enough to deserve its place in the paper, the only thing that will stop a reader is lack of clarity. Clarity of writing usually follows clarity of thought. Bear in mind George Orwell's six elementary rules:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut out a word, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive if you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of the everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than you say anything outright barbarous.

Metaphors
"A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image," said Orwell. "On the other hand, a metaphor which is technically 'dead' (like 'iron resolution') has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there's a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves."

Short words
Use them. They are easy to spell and easy to understand. So prefer about to approximately, after to following, let to permit, but to however, use to utilise, make to manufacture, plant to facility, take part to participate, set up to establish, show to demonstrate and so on. Underdeveloped countries are often better described as poor, substantive usually means real or big.

Unnecessary words
Some words add nothing but length to prose. Use adjectives to make your meaning more precise and be cautious of those you find yourself using to make it more emphatic. The word very is an example. Try leaving it out and see whether the meaning is changed. He was tall may have more force than He was very tall. Avoid cutbacks (cuts will do), track record (record), wilderness areas (wild areas), large-scale (big), monsoon activity (rain), weather conditions (weather), and the like.

Shoot off, or rather, shoot as many as prepositions after verbs as possible. Thus people can meet rather than meet together; companies can be sold rather than sold off; plots can be hatched but not hatched up; children can be sent to bed rather than sent off to bed.

The word community is usually unnecessary. So the Muslim community means Muslims, the business community means business, the international community, if it means anything, means other countries, aid agencies or, occasionally, the family of nations.

Use words with care
A heart condition is, more often than not, a bad heart; to outrage somebody's modesty means to sexually attack somebody; positive thoughts translates as optimism; a substantially finished bridge is an unfinished bridge, a major speech usually just a speech. Something with reliability problems probably does not work.

'Indish' expressions
A case can be made for using words and expressions like abscond, mishap, miscreant, take cognisance of, seized of the matter, wee hours, breathe one's last, expedite and their Chaucerian cousins so dear to some Indian hearts. But this the language of babus, ushered into mainstream journalism by lazy professionals unwilling to come up with an alternative. Best avoided.

Active not passive
An armed gangster was shot dead by police is better expressed as: Police shot dead an armed gangster.

Jargon
Eliminate it. All sections of a news publication — and especially the news section — should be intelligible to all readers. There are simple words that can do the job of exponential (try fast), procrastinate (delay), caprice (whim) and so on. Try not to use foreign words or phrases unless there is no English equivalent, which is unusual (so a year or per year, not per annum; a person or per person, not per capita). Be particularly wary of French and Latin words or expressions (beyond one's authority not ultra vires). Avoid, above all, meaningless or ambiguous jargon.

Other advice
1. Do not be stuffy or pompous. Use the language of everyday speech, not that of spokesmen, lawyers and bureaucrats. Take passing through the periphery of. It's so much clearer to say skirting the edge of.

2. Do not be hectoring or arrogant. Those who disagree with you or your publication are not necessarily stupid or insane. You can make your views clear without becoming insulting or offensive.

3. Do not be too pleased with yourself. Don't boast of your own cleverness by telling readers that you correctly predicted something or that you have a scoop. Avoid references to this correspondent or your correspondent. They are always self-conscious and often self-congratulatory.

4. Do not be sloppy in the construction of sentences and paragraphs. Do not use a participle unless you make it clear what it applies to. Thus avoid Having died, they had to bury him, or Proceeding along this line of thought, the cause of the crash becomes clear.

6. Avoid, where possible, euphemisms and circumlocutions promoted by interest-groups. The hearing-impaired are simply deaf. Prostitutes don't become chaste when referred to as commercial sex workers. It is no disrespect to the disabled sometimes to describe them as crippled. The underprivileged may be disadvantaged, but are more likely just poor. The communal situation certainly won't get better — or worse, for that matter — if Hindus are referred to as the majority community and the rest as the minority community.

7. All changes in city-names, where officially done, must be respected. So Mumbai rather than Bombay, Chennai for Madras, Kochi for Cochin, Vadodara for Baroda.

8. It is an advantage to be informal about the way in which you communicate with readers, to talk to them rather than at them. But remember there's a thin line between informality and inanity. Do not be too chatty. Surprise, surprise is more irritating than informative. So is Ho, ho, etc.

9. Don't overdo the use of don't, can't, isn't, won't, etc.

10. Using Hindi words or phrases in headlines and copy, much in vogue these days, can only be justified if their meaning or effectiveness is irredeemably diluted in translation. Clever wordplay that combines Hindi and English to construct, say, a headline is welcome, but do not end up being too clever by half.

11. The computer is undoubtedly a help when it comes to writing copy, enabling you as it does to access a thesaurus and spell-check words at the press of a couple of keys, not to mention eliminate all traces of rewriting and correction. It is the thesaurus that needs watching here: picking the best replacement option for a word does not mean picking the most exotic or, worse, complicated that the terminal throws up. When in doubt, stick with the staid.

12. Try your best to be lucid. Keep complicated sentence constructions and gimmicks to a minimum, if necessary by remembering the New Yorker's comment: "Backward ran the sentences until reeled the mind."

• Mark Twain described how a good writer treats sentences: "At times he may indulge himself with a long one, but he will make sure there are no folds in it, no vagueness, no parenthetical interruptions of its view as a whole; when he has done with it, it won't be a sea serpent with half of its arches under the water; it will be a torch-light procession."
• In case you missed the point, that sentence of Twain's has 59 words in it, but its meaning is apparent at first reading. And, sorry Mark, but a modem publication would replace your first semi-colon with a full stop and your second with a long dash.
• Long paragraphs, like long sentences, can confuse the reader. "The paragraph," according to Fowler, "is essentially a unit of thought, not of length; it must be homogeneous in subject matter and sequential in treatment." One-sentence paragraphs should be used only occasionally.
• Clear thinking is, in fact; the key to clear writing. "A scrupulous writer," observed Orwell, "in every sentence that he writes will ask himself at least four questions: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?"

Scrupulous writers will notice that their copy is edited only lightly and is likely to be used. It may even be read.


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