PIMLICO
405
ESSENTIAL ENGLISH FOR JOURNALISTS, EDITORS AND WRITERS
Harold Evans was editor of the Sunday Times from 1967 to 1981 and editor of The Times from 1981 to 1982. His account of these years, Good Times, Bad Times, was a national bestseller. He won a European gold medal for his efforts for the thalidomide children. He is the author of Pictures on a Page, which has been acclaimed around the world as the bible of photo-journalism, and the celebrated The American Century: People, Power and Politics – An Illustrated History. In America, he has been editor-in-chief of Conde Nast Traveler magazine, and president and publisher of the Random House trade group in New York. He has most recently been editorial director and vice-chairman of US News and World Report, the Daily News, Fast Company and Atlantic Monthly. He lives in New York with his wife Tina Brown and their two children.
Crawford Gillan is a former editor of the Evening Star, Ipswich, and of the Essex County Standard. Before that he was deputy editor of the Cambridge Evening News. He has also worked as a sub-editor on the Daily Express and the Guardian. He chaired the editorial training committee of the Guild (now Society) of Editors for three years in the mid-1990s. He now works as a freelance editor and consultant.
ESSENTIAL ENGLISH
For Journalists, Editors and Writers
HAROLD EVANS
Fully Revised by Crawford Gillan
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Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781446412114
www.randomhouse.co.uk
Published by Pimlico 2000
10
Copyright © Harold Evans 1972, 2000
Revised edition copyright © Harold Evans and Crawford Gillan 2000
Harold Evans has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
Crawford Gillan has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of the revised material other than that supplied by Harold Evans
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
First published in Great Britain as
Newsman’s English by
William Heinemann 1972
Revised edition first published in Great Britain by
Pimlico 2000
Pimlico
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Contents
Foreword to the Pimlico edition
Editor’s Preface
1
The Making of a Newspaper
The Copydesk
The Text Editor
The Copy-taster
The Projection Editor
The Revise Editor
Standards in Editing
What Makes a Good Text Editor?
2
Good English
Sentences – Limit the Ideas
Be Active
Be Positive
Avoid Monotony
3
Words
Use Specific Words
Write with Nouns and Verbs
Strike Out Meaningless Modifiers
Avoid Needless Repetition
Avoid Monologophobia
Watch the Prepositions
Care for Meanings
Avoid Clichés
Story Sources of Wordiness
4
Watch this Language
Wasteful Words
Redundancies
Stale Expressions
5
The Structure of a News Story – Intros
Chronology
Source Obsession
Overloading
Three Aids to Better Intros
Special Intro Problems
6
The Structure of a News Story – The News Lead
Action Stories
A Good News Narrative
Statement–Opinion Stories
How the Dailies Handled the Story
An American Example
Speeches and Reports
Running Statement–Opinion Stories
7
Background
Background for Intelligibility
Background for Interest
Story-telling
Exercises in Choice of Style
News-features Editing
8
Headlines
What the News Headline Says
The Headline’s Purpose
How Many Ideas?
Grammatical Traps
Impartiality
Accuracy
How the News Headline Says It
Verbs
Subject Omitted
Who’s Who
Be Specific
Saying Where
Be Positive
Single Thoughts
The Key Word
Labels That Work
Headlines in Practice
Free-style Headlines
Letting the Words Take Over
Good and Bad Puns
Feature Headings
Specialised Pages
Headlinese
The Seven Deadly Sins
9
Headline Vocabulary
Notes
Index
Foreword to the Pimlico Edition
Hugh Cudlipp was the journalists’ journalist of the 1940s and 1950s. Harold Evans was the journalists’ journalist of the 1960s and 1970s. Both remain journalists’ journalists for the new millennium.
It was fitting, therefore, that Cudlipp, in his Foreword to the first edition of Evans’s Newsman’s English (as it was first called) should describe the book as unique. The word unique is too often misused. That it is still so often misused confirms the need for this welcome return of a masterful treatise on the English language.
A good English sentence is still a good English sentence. And a cliché remains a cliché. As the information available to the ordinary man, woman and child continues to multiply enormously each year, the need for good English not only persists, but becomes of increasin
g importance. Everyone needs a good editor. And it is the consumer who needs a good editor more than most as this eruption of knowledge threatens to overwhelm all in its unrelenting wake.
There are those who predict that content above all else will be king. I disagree. Context, provided by expert users of the language, will rule and shape people’s lives in the future. Hence the need for this adroit revision of this unique book.
In the years since it went out of print no other text has come close to fulfilling its role. Thus the Society of Editors, in its inaugural year following the amalgamation of the Guild of Editors and the Association of British Editors, enthusiastically welcomes its re-publication.
Many of its members grew up on Evans. They not only appreciated what Evans preached, they also understood that Evans practised what he preached. He was not merely a teacher telling us what ought to be done. He was a practitioner who showed us what was done. The book was required reading for all those who became journalists in the 1970s. This new edition must become required reading for all those who will become journalists in the new millennium.
It has become far too fashionable for the use of good English to be derided. Indeed our own profession has not always helped the matter. Newspapers, radio stations and television broadcasters have all contributed to sloppy usage of the language. That is not to say that English should not be dynamic and move forward. Of course it should. But it must also be correct. There is a virtue in all language being correct and the journalist who believes otherwise is a poor journalist.
In the new millennium the Society of Editors sees its main goal as supplying a community at ease with itself with as free a flow of information as possible. But that information is of no use at all if it is obscured by poor, jargon-ridden and dense English. Clear English should be a priority for all those who use the language in this new millennium. And news English at its best is the clearest English of all.
This book remains not only essential reading for those who enjoy clear language. It remains essential reading for all those who pass knowledge to others. All editors and fellow journalists should devour this book. All writers, readers, listeners and viewers need to use the language in the English language well and there is no better guide than Harold Evans.
NEIL FOWLER
President, Society of Editors
Editor, The Western Mail
January 2000
Editor’s Preface
When I was chairing the editorial training committee of the Guild of Editors (now the Society of Editors) in the mid-1990s one of the big concerns among editors was the poor grasp of written English by recruits into journalism.
It seemed to matter little whether the trainees had come straight from school or, as most of them do these days, had entered the media industry as university graduates. So rife was the problem it was even suggested that the initial training programme for journalists should start with a compulsory course in remedial English. Assuming that students recruited into journalism could be expected to be among the most articulate and literate of their generation, it did not say much for the rest of their peer group.
It was while contemplating this problem – and how to tackle it – that we began to realise how much we regretted the disappearance from print of Harold Evans’s powerful guide to the written word, Newsman’s English.
As editor of the Sunday Times in the late 1960s and through to the 1980s, Harold Evans was an inspiration and role model for a generation of journalists, not least for those of us lucky enough to become editors ourselves. Who can forget the tingle of excitement on turning to the Sunday Times each week to follow the latest instalment in the paper’s battles to fend off attempts to gag it in its many public-spirited campaigns – such as the one on behalf of the victims of the thalidomide drug – or simply to discover the truth behind one of the big stories of the day, arrived at only through the painstaking research of the Sunday Times team of investigative reporters.
It was not surprising, therefore, that when Harold Evans chose to share some of the secrets of the trade with a wider audience, in a series of instructional books, ‘Editing and Design’, the result was equally inspirational and influential for those of us cutting our first teeth as journalists. For not only were his books working manuals in every sense, packed with practical techniques for sharpening skills of communication, they reflected the very essence of what successful newspapers should be all about – that everything in them should relate to human beings; the abstract word should always be given flesh and the abstract story spiced with examples.
As Harold Evans says in Newsman’s English: ‘People can recognise themselves in stories about particulars. The abstract is another world. It requires an effort of imagination to transport ourselves there. The writer should bring it to us.’
What better template to ensure the reader is always at the centre of everything a newspaper does? And what better way to spread the message about how the use of good English is essential to achieve this vital rapport between writer and reader than by resurrecting Newsman’s English, Book One in the original series?
Fortunately, Harold Evans was happy to agree to the Guild’s suggestion that the book be republished. The result is an updated version now entitled Essential English for Journalists, Editors and Writers, a title that not only avoids accusations of gender bias in these changing times, but that seems to sit comfortably beside Essential Law for Journalists, the work that has served so well and so long as a legal bible for journalists.
This new edition is a marriage of two books, Newsman’s English and News Headlines, the third book in the original series. It seemed sensible to extend guidance on the written word to include the advice on headlines. Good sub-editors have always been worth their weight in gold but nowadays there is a temptation, in some quarters, to imagine that computerisation means anyone can be instantly transformed into a text editor. Computers have certainly made it much easier to handle the mechanics of type than in the days of hot metal. But sticking the uninitiated in front of a screen does not account for the multitude of skills and knowledge needed to edit a story so that it reads swiftly, logically, vividly, economically and, of course, accurately. Nor does it prevent sub-editors from writing wordy, vague or confused headlines when what is called for is examples that are attractive, imaginative and full of vigour. The art of headline writing can be developed and this book establishes the principles for a sound approach.
Although the book is aimed mainly at journalists – both the experienced and the inexperienced can benefit from it – the many helpful suggestions for improving clarity of meaning will be invaluable for anyone who has to communicate through the written word.
New examples of contemporary articles are included, mainly from American newspapers, but much of the original content remains. References to events at the time the book was first published give a slightly anachronistic feel, but the examples fit the bill so precisely that it seemed churlish to change them. The important point is that the message is still valid today – perhaps even more so, given the concern expressed by editors about the use of English by today’s trainees.
Editing this edition has been an extremely worthwhile refresher course and a reminder of how easy it is to slip into sloppy habits. I commend it to all writers and editors, experienced or otherwise.
CRAWFORD GILLAN
Essential English
CHAPTER ONE
The Making of a Newspaper
The news is thrown at him in huge miscellaneous masses, which, but for his labours, would kill the reader stone-dead with mental indigestion. He has to cook this mass, having first trimmed it into reasonable proportions, keeping one eye on the probable accuracy of the facts as stated, another on the law of libel, another on various other considerations which crop up from time to time, such as the law relating to elections, and yet a fourth, which must be no less vigilant than the other three, upon the clock. Sub-editors, when I meet them, seem to have only two eyes just like other people; wher
e they keep the other two I cannot say, but I know they must have them.
EDWARD SHANKS
Enough news is arriving today at any large newspaper office to make four or five fat novels and fill the news columns many times over. This raw material of the newspaper is as diverse as the human race. There is an earth tremor in Brazil, and another kind of tremor on Wall Street; strawberries are expensive in London, and the peace talks in Kosovo have broken down; a famous film director has died in Hollywood, in Iraq a new military build-up is under way. The international news has been transmitted by satellite to the national offices of the major news agencies. It has been checked, rough-edited and flashed electronically to one focal point: the copydesk.
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