Essential English
Page 12
There is a typographical objection to long intros, too. They look slabby and uninviting to read. It should be possible to read the intro – and digest its meaning – in a quick scanning. If you have to read an intro with care it is a failure.
A 40-word maximum would not be at all unreasonable: about 30 words is better. Editors of the spoken word in broadcasting especially should aim for the shorter intro. Long sentences with subsidiary clauses are a snare for announcers and a strain on the listener.
A limit of 30-40 words is not hard to achieve. The skill is in achieving brevity without depriving an intro of precision. Anybody can write a five-word intro: ‘A man was killed yesterday’. That is not news. It is a vacuum. Filling it with just the right amount of detail is where the skill is needed. Too little specific content makes an intro vague; too much is bewildering. The editor has to make sure the intro is precise enough to refer to a unique happening, but the precision must not be prolix. A great deal of harm has been done by the old rule that the intro should try to answer the questions Who? Why? What? Where? When? This is a rule for a news story, but not for an intro. The intro must concentrate on effects, on one news idea. It must contain some identification, but origins, sequence and chronology are all subsidiary to what resulted in the end. The preoccupation with trying to answer all those five questions overloads too many intros, to the detriment of meaning. The obsession with secondary details manifests itself in a number of ways, but two grammatical symptoms are of prime importance. Where intros begin with a long subsidiary clause or a participle, you are in the presence of a muddle.
In the next example the opening clause is set in italic. All this building material has to be carried along in the mind as meaningless junk until the main clause (from ‘materials availability’) has been read. Only at the end of the long sentence does the reader know what the intro is all about. Meaning is acquired more quickly if the sentence is turned round (right) to begin with the main clause:
With no sign that there is a general improvement in the supply of common bricks, despite big increases in production, or of copper tubes and fittings and sanitary ware, materials availability remains the building industry’s most urgent problem, reports the National Federation of Building Trades Employers.
The National Federation of Building Trades Employers reports that materials availability remains the building industry’s most urgent problem, with no sign that there is a general improvement in the supply of common bricks, despite big increases in production, or of copper tubes and fittings and sanitary ware.
But better still, of course, the language should be changed as well as the sentence structure: ‘materials availability’ and ‘building industry’ are clumsy abstract ways of describing a simple specific:
Builders are still being held up by a shortage of common bricks, despite big increases in production, and of copper tubes and fittings and sanitary ware, says the National Federation of Building Trades Employers.
A very common form of opening with a subsidiary clause betrays a split mind:
While Lord Hill was denying last night that the BBC was considering advertising to offset costs, the head of Scottish Television claimed the Government was threatening the future of ITV.
Behind this intro there is a failure of decision. There are two news ideas. The writer has to decide.
Lord Hill denied last night that the BBC was considering advertising to offset costs.
The managing director of Scottish Television, Mr _____, claimed last night that the Government was threatening the future of independent television.
Intros beginning with a participle are similarly weak and muddled. The participle is the weakest part of the verb and it is usually the intro to a long subsidiary clause:
Referring to the statement made on Labour plans to force local authorities to introduce comprehensive schools, Alderman __________, Conservative Leader of the Inner London Education Authority, said: …
Criticising the Administration, Senator Muskie last night …
Saying that on Friday he had agreed terms for the relief airlift, Colonel Ojukwu yesterday …
The subsidiary clause at the beginning of a sentence asks too much of the reader. The first part of the sentence means nothing until the reader has read the second part. Readers may give up. If they go on, they have to hold in their mind the jumble of words until they have read a second jumble of words which then give meaning to the whole. Even the writers of subsidiary clauses themselves lose their way and relate the preamble to the wrong subject:
Alarmed by the wave of violence that has swept Singapore during the last six months, the death penalty has been passed on those guilty of kidnapping.
Plump, crew-cut, blinking a little behind black-rimmed spectacles, Allan Sherman was born in Chicago in 1924.
Opening with a subsidiary clause is especially irritating when there is an unidentified pronoun:
With what his colleagues called a ‘clarion call’ to party unity, Mr …
Declaring that it could not be opened until officially approved, Mr …
Whose colleagues, what party? What could not be opened – a public house, a church, an envelope? No reader should ever be asked to cope with such conundrums.
Finally, trouble can also come from long subsidiary clauses in the middle of an intro. What follows is a newspaper example where readers have to carry two subsidiary clauses in their heads before being told what all the fuss is about. This intro can be rewritten in the active voice (1 below).
That delays mentioning the three baby-food manufacturers, which is a pity, but the words baby-food makers will be in the headline. Alternatively (2 below) the intro can lead off with the baby-food manufacturers and the badly intruding second subsidiary clause (by the scientists who headed the work that led to the banning of cyclamates) can be compressed and transposed so that it does not interrupt the flow of thought. The use of a dash in punctuation here gives the reader a pause and the story a neat emphasis.
The three baby-food manufacturers, Rumble, Yummy and Toddlertum, who voluntarily withdrew all monosodium glutamate from their products at the weekend were accused today, by the scientists who headed the work that led to the banning of cyclamates, of panicking unnecessarily, and causing public alarm.
(1) Scientists whose work led to the banning of cyclamates accused the three baby-food manufacturers Rumble, Yummy and Toddlertum, of causing needless public alarm by the voluntary withdrawal of monosodium glutamate from their products.
OR
(2) The three baby-food manufacturers Rumble, Yummy and Toddlertum, who voluntarily withdrew all monosodium glutamate from their products at the weekend, were today accused of causing needless public alarm – by the scientists whose research led to the banning of cyclamates.
Let us now examine in detail the obsessions with secondary news ideas, with chronology, and with source, which produce bad intros.
Chronology
In certain feature and news-feature reports (discussed later) a chronological construction is appropriate. This is a clear narrative technique. It is quite different from allowing secondary details to creep into the hard news intro.
After hearing shooting at the Berlin Wall yesterday an American military policeman raced to the scene and found East German guards trying to drag a refugee back. The American soldier went to a second-storey window overlooking the Wall, threw a tear-gas grenade, to make the East Germans release the refugee, then climbed on top of the Wall and amid a hail of bullets between East and West helped to pull the refugee to the West.
This is dramatic reading but it is nowhere good enough for a hard news intro. The antecedents of the action – which have produced a subsidiary clause at the beginning – are secondary. They come unnaturally in the excitement of telling the news. Anyone who had seen that incident would say: ‘I saw a tremendous rescue at the Wall today – an American soldier dragged a refugee across. They were shooting at him all the time.’ That is the germ of the hard news intro.
‘Yes’, your listener will say, ‘and what happened to the soldier and the refugee? Were they killed?’ ‘The refugee was wounded but they told me he’d be all right.’
If you had been telling the story chronologically, that piece of information would have had to wait till the very end of a long recital. Your listener (and the reader) would rightly grow very impatient. In conversation and in news reporting one begins naturally with a quick account of the action – and the result. If we do this here we discard the preamble ‘after hearing shooting at the Berlin Wall yesterday’. Indeed we discard the whole first sentence. The first attempt now at a hard news intro can be built from the way one would have told the news orally.
An American soldier dragged a refugee across the Berlin Wall yesterday. The East Germans were shooting all the time. The refugee was wounded but his life is not in danger.
This tells the story but it is staccato and imprecise. It omits the fact that both sides were shooting during the rescue. It sounds routine: journalists would say it is colourless. Try again:
An American military policeman braved a hail of bullets to pull a wounded refugee over the Berlin Wall yesterday.
This has compressed the action and tells the result. Even in the second paragraph of the lead we would still avoid going right back in the chronology (‘after hearing the shooting’).
We would cram in some more action, and begin to substantiate and explain the intro in this second paragraph:
The soldier, 22-year-old Hans Puhl, threw a tear-gas grenade to make East German guards release the refugee. Then amid fire from the East and counter-fire from the West, he climbed on the Wall to drop a rope to the wounded man, Michel Meyer, aged 21.
You will notice how we have saved till later the explanation of how he climbed on the Wall from a second-storey window – and of course how he came to be on the scene at all. These things happened first, but they are not first in importance and so they have no place in the intro. Only now, in the third paragraph, can chronology take over. The men’s names have been given in this second paragraph so that the rest of the story can be told more easily without confusion of the two ‘hes’ or the elegant variations ‘the refugee’, ‘the soldier’.
In a second example below the obsession with chronology has produced a gargantuan subsidiary clause, introduced by a participle. The intro is rewritten on the right with a simple announcement of the statement’s effect.
Replying to Viscount Lambton (C. Berwick-upon-Tweed) who asked if the Minister of Agriculture would relax existing restrictions on the importation of live and dead poultry following upon the introduction of the fowl pest vaccination policy, Mr Christopher Soames said in the House of Commons yesterday: ‘I have decided, following the recommendations of the Plant Committee, to allow the importation of poultry breeding stock and hatching eggs where this is likely to be of benefit to the commercial stock in this country.’
Poultry breeding stock and hatching eggs may now be imported more freely. The Minister of Agriculture, Mr Christopher Soames, told Viscount Lambton (C. Berwick-upon-Tweed) yesterday that, following the Plant Committee’s advice, imports would be allowed where they were likely to benefit our commercial stock.
A chronologically obsessed intro does not always begin with a tell-tale subsidiary clause or participle. In the next example the intro begins directly enough, but its concern with an over-long sequence delays the real human news. The location details aggravate the failure. ‘A field near Chatham Gardens Apartments’ does not merely intrude extra words, it delays the action. On the right is the rewritten version – constructed in the same trial and error process as the Berlin Wall intro.
A bulldozer, started up at full speed by vandals and then abandoned, raced one-quarter mile across a field near Chatham Gardens Apartments last night and rammed into a bedroom where two children lay sleeping.
Neither of the children was injured by the six-ton machine which hit a crib containing a two-year-old boy and knocked it several feet across the room.
The vandals, described as teenagers by witnesses, jumped off the out-of-control bulldozer moments before the crash and fled on foot. Damage to the building is expected to run into thousands of dollars.
Patrolmen Edgar Bastian and Dominic Rotolo said the two sleeping children were William Gray, 2, and his sister Marguerite, 10 months. Their parents, Mr and Mrs Richard Gray, were not at home.
A runaway six-ton bulldozer rammed into a bedroom where two children were asleep last night. It knocked a crib containing a two-year-old across the room.
But the children were unhurt.
The bulldozer was started at full speed by vandals on a field near …
You will note where chronological sequence is allowed to take over – after the news lead.
Source Obsession
This disease gives priority to the event, place, organisation or person that yielded the news and too little to the news itself. Here we might usefully distinguish three rough categories of news intro:
The general news intro retailing a fact for the general reader. This needs a minimum source identification: ‘Pensions will go up by £2 a week from January 1’. The source for such a plain fact can follow in the second part of the sentence, or in a second sentence. Too often it intrudes into the first sentence and when there are a lot of such details the intro becomes confusing.
The general news intro retailing an opinion or quote for the general reader. This needs an early statement of source so that the reader can judge the worth of the statement: ‘The Prime Minister said yesterday that he believed unemployment would fall “dramatically” in the next three months’. All opinion stories must have the source in the first sentence – but the place and occasion of the statement are subsidiary and can follow in the second.
The specialist news story retailing either fact or opinion for specialist readers, i.e. for local readers, for business readers, or sports readers, and so on. In sports and business sections of national newspapers and in local newspapers prompt identification is required because the names are the essence of the news: ‘Joe Bloggs is “certain” to play for England, said the team manager, Kevin Keegan, yesterday.’
The commonest news stories are in the first category, retailing a fact for the general reader. Here for every quotable individual justifiably edging into the first words of an intro, there are ten of this kind, either plain or fancy:
It was announced in the Church Times yesterday …
At a special meeting of Manchester Corporation Housing Committee this afternoon, it was agreed after a three-hour meeting that …
All this before the reader is let into the secret of what the report is all about. Insignificant elements of source in factual general news intros can be deferred to the second paragraph, letting the first sentence tell the news:
All Manchester Council house rents will go up by £1.50 a week. This was decided at …
The worst defect of source-obsessed intros in all three categories is focusing on the administrative mechanics behind the news – the committee, the bill, the statement, the hall where the meeting was held, the official who distributed the handout:
North Riding police yesterday issued a statement on the arrangements for the Queen’s visit …
This makes the issuing of the statement, rather than its content, the important item. There are other examples of how easily the obsession with source makes the administrative mechanics appear to be the news:
In its voluminous report submitted to the Government earlier this month, the committee on educational integration is understood to have made 213 major recommendations touching upon all aspects of education, including the medium of instruction, education policy and the functioning of universities.
One of the most important recommendations of the committee is that …
This is where the intro should begin – with this precise recommendation. The second paragraph will do to tell the reader it is part of a ‘voluminous’ (i.e. bulky, or 700-page, or 5 kilo
) report.
The rewritten version on the right below, bringing the live subject into the news at the earliest moment, saves 3 – 4 lines of type on a 13-line story:
A bill to authorise the study of the feasibility of keeping the St. Lawrence Seaway open all year round has been approved by the House Public Works Committee.
But the committee yesterday amended the bill, which had been passed by the Senate, to limit the cost of the study to a maximum of 50,000 dollars. The study would include ways of deicing harbours and channels to permit winter navigation.
Ways are to be sought to keep the St. Lawrence Seaway and Great Lakes open all year round.
The House Public Works Committee yesterday approved a bill to investigate harbour and channel de-icing. But it amended the bill, which passed the Senate, to limit the study to 50,000 dollars.
The next example is an intro from the middle category. The news value of the story depends here on the source, in this case the Law Society, the professional organisation of English solicitors (a description which few text editors handling the agency story bothered to give the reader). The early identification of this authoritative source, however, emphatically does not mean overloading the intro with more than the source, as on the left. The intro should be as on the right: