Essential English
Page 21
The first version would have been quite acceptable to many newspapers. But anyone editing on a paper which tries to make a popular appeal will often be impelled to use the story-telling technique.
The following story has the customary hard news intro – when the hard news is really not there to justify the report’s position as a news story:
Margate Corporation will today receive a rear-door flap for a dust cart – which had been 21 days on its way by railway.
British Rail said: ‘With a continued heavy flow of traffic it is regretted that the consignment in question, having been offloaded into Platform 2, has not yet been sent on its way, but it will be delivered tomorrow.’
Passengers on the 5.41 p.m. from King’s Cross to Welwyn Garden City were puzzled by the large crate addressed to Margate Corporation standing on a platform for more than a fortnight. So one of them wrote to the Town Clerk, Margate, and the Stationmaster at King’s Cross.
The only element of interest in this story is that curious passengers saved Margate’s rear-door flap. The story could be given a livelier beginning in the hard news style:
Commuters on the 5.41 p.m. King’s Cross to Welwyn Garden City helped to equip a Margate Corporation dust cart yesterday.
Puzzled by the large crate for Margate standing untouched on their platform 2 for more than a fortnight they wrote to Margate Corporation and King’s Cross stationmaster.
The crate contained ...
One paper made the most of the news item by adopting the story-telling technique:
The enormous, gunmetal-grey crate on Platform 2 at King’s Cross, addressed to Margate Corporation, intrigued the commuters on the 5.41 p.m. to Welwyn Garden City. Every night they examined it and wondered what could be inside.
Until today ... more than a fortnight later ... they could stand the suspense no longer.
And their spokesman, solicitor Mr. W.J. Shaw, wrote to the Town Clerk at Margate and the Stationmaster at King’s Cross.
‘It seems amazing that British Rail can leave consignments, which may be urgent, lying around on a station for weeks,’ said Mr. Shaw at his Holborn office this afternoon.
What IS in the 6ft × 4ft crate which weighs 1cwt 56lb?
A rear-door flap for one of Margate’s dust carts.
It was despatched from the Letchworth engineering firm of Shelvoke and Drewery on August 27.
Said a spokesman for British Rail: ‘With a continued heavy flow of traffic it is regretted that the consignment in question, having been off-loaded into Platform 2, has not yet been sent on its way.’
This afternoon the dust-cart flap is on its way to Margate and should arrive tomorrow.
It will have taken 21 days.
The story-telling structure is ideal for routine court reports. The court reports in some serious newspapers may be published for the significance of the legal judgment, and in local papers, for the familiar names of those involved. For many newspapers, however, it is neither of these news points which attracts. The court reports are published for the human drama they provide. Names and legal sequels are the small print in the credits column of a theatrical programme. Of course text editors must take great care to tell only the story supported by the judgment and by what the witnesses said in court. If there is a doubt it should be resolved in favour of the straightforward report. It is better to bore a thousand readers than to defame one.
Here is a straightforward court report:
Four factory workers were fined a total of £14 for using intimidating behaviour against a fellow worker at West Bromwich magistrates court yesterday.
They were ... They were accused of intimidating 32-year-old Lester Seville, a tool setter of Blackthorne Road, Walsall, who had not joined a strike, now 13 weeks old, at the factory, Newmans Tubes Ltd, Wednesbury.
Charges of using threatening behaviour were dismissed. Mr Seville told the court the four men were pickets who stopped him one night when he left the factory to try and persuade him to join the strike. ‘I was frightened because of their attitude’, he said. They were quite prepared to use ‘a little bit of pressure.’
Mr George Jones, defending, said the men merely wanted to hold a quiet conversation with Seville.
Using the story-telling technique, the text editor would select the point where the action began and build the story from there.
Four pickets lay in wait one night for a fellow worker – to try to persuade him to join a strike.
And they were quite prepared to use ‘a little bit of pressure’, according to the worker, 32-year-old Lester Seville.
‘I was frightened because of their attitude,’ he told magistrates at West Bromwich, Staffordshire, yesterday.
It happened during a strike, now 13 weeks old, at Newmans Tubes Ltd, Wednesbury.
Mr George Jones, defending four men before the court, said that they merely wanted to hold a quiet conversation with Mr Seville, a tool setter, of Blackthorne Road, Walsall.
At no time did they use any force or threats. The four accused . . . were fined a total of £14 for using intimidating behaviour.
Charges of using threatening behaviour were dismissed.
The source of news reports may be delayed even more. It is not until the sixth paragraph here that the reader is told that the following is a court report. (The headline: ‘Golfer takes a swing at the Sergeant.’) Paragraph 6 is worth your attention. It is the link between the yarn and its source.
Golfer Sidney McCallum lost his temper, took a swing … and broke a policeman’s jaw.
It happened between the eighth and ninth holes on the Richmond Park golf course, Surrey.
McCallum, a 42-year-old cable jointer, of Petersfield Rise, Putney, London SW – ‘a fairly quick golfer’ – was playing the course behind Sergeant Francis Bott.
And McCallum told the sergeant ‘Get a move on, you’re slowing us up’.
Sgt Bott said: ‘We can’t go any quicker because of those chaps in front.’
Then, Mr K. Hargreave, prosecuting, told the South Western magistrates court yesterday, the sergeant received ‘a very hard blow.’
He was taken to hospital with a broken jaw, concussion and amnesia. He has lost six weeks’ work but is expected to return on December 1.
McCallum later told police that Sgt. Bott had tried to throw him: ‘I was out for a game of golf not a punch-up. I stepped back and hit him once.’
The magistrate, Sir John Cameron, told McCallum: ‘Fortunately violence on the golf course is not very prevalent. I am not going to take as serious a view as if this had occurred on a football ground.’
He conditionally discharged McCallum for a year for causing bodily harm, but ordered him to pay £10 costs.
And so, too, with the reporting of wills. If one is working on a local paper, the news will be how much has been left and to whom. There is no substitute for the details here, presented directly as ‘Mr X left … and his bequests were …’ If the person involved is not well known or the sum not large, the popular national or big evening paper will generally expect the story to be edited so that the point is near the end rather than the beginning. They will not want:
Mrs Wells of Barton-on-Sea left a bottle of sherry and a bottle of gin in her will, announced yesterday, to a Gas Board official because he was so cheerful when installing her central heating.
The executives will ask for a rewrite which makes the news into a tale:
Every time the man from the Gas Board called at Mrs Amy Wells’s home, she changed her mind about the radiators she was having installed.
But the gasman kept on smiling.
And though he did not know it then, his smile had won him a friend.
Mr Lawrence Price, district sales manager of the Southern Gas Board, who supervised the installation of the radiators two years ago, heard last night that Mrs Wells, of Barton-on-Sea, Hampshire, had remembered him in her £11,655 will.
Mrs Wells, who was 82 when she died, left him a bottle of gin and a bottle of sherr
y – ‘for keeping on smiling every time I changed my mind.’
Exercises in Choice of Style
The narrative or story-telling style of news reports has validity on a number of occasions which can be identified:
1. When a narrative can be used as an adjunct to a main news story, rather like zooming from a general scene to a detail
2. When a story is so familiar from other media that the readers/viewers know the result, but would now be intrigued by detail and drama
3. Second, third and fourth days of developing stories; for instance, once the news of the massacre of schoolchildren in Littleton, Colorado, had been recorded on days one and two, there was ample scope for picking up individual stories and telling them in narrative style. What happened hour by hour, for instance, to the SWAT team (Special Weapons Attack Team). A day in the life of one of the teachers. And so on. The varying styles might usefully be demonstrated by looking at a number of published reports that appeared in the American press
On the left is a straight news story of a student disappointed by a beauty treatment. As a crime story it is small beer. But told as a little human story it would have more appeal. The version on the right is the rewritten narrative style of the story. It is more interesting and it saves 24 per cent of the space.
Authorities yesterday shut down the illicit medical practice of a Queens woman – dubbed Madame Olga – who allegedly disfigured a college student by giving her illegal injections designed to prevent wrinkles, prosecutors said.
Olga (Madame Olga) Ramirez, 34, was charged with practising medicine without a license, assault, reckless endangerment and possession of hypodermic needles, Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said.
‘I am very upset,’ said Izadeli Montalvo, 22, of Queens, who charged she has suffered recurring facial swelling since receiving the injections four months ago.
‘I don’t know what the future consequences of this will be,’ the St. John’s University student said. ‘I am already suffering.’
For at least four years, Ramirez worked out of her College Point home, where investigators seized hundreds of needles, containers of medicines and a small amount of hormones, authorities said.
Ramirez, who had business cards claiming the title doctor, ‘operated for some time with reckless disregard for the people who turned to her for help,’ Brown said.
Ramirez was charged with assault for giving injections to Montalvo, who told the Daily News she went for a consultation with Madame Olga in December and was informed she looked 35.
She said she paid $600 for three injections, which Ramirez promised would make her skin look more youthful and prevent wrinkles.
Instead, Montalvo said, she was left with swelling and numbness in her face. ‘It was very painful. It was a very bad experience,’ she said.
Brown said Montalvo was temporarily disfigured by the treatment. Her lawyer, Mason Pimsler, said she suffered a severed facial nerve that may require surgery to repair.
Investigators are not yet sure what the injections contained, but suspect it may have been a collagenlike substance. They seized bottles bearing the names ‘biopolymer’ and ‘biopolymere’, authorities said.
Ramirez is licensed by the state as an esthetician, enabling her to do makeup work and apply over-the-counter medicines, but not to prescribe or administer drugs, authorities said.
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Izadeli Montalvo, a student at St. John’s University in Queens, was worried to be told she looked 35.
She is only 22.
Izadeli put such faith in the woman who gave her the bad news, beauty specialist Olga Ramirez, 34, that last December she paid $600 for three injections she was assured would make her look more youthful and prevent wrinkles.
It was a disaster. Izadeli’s face swelled up painfully time and again over four months. She had suffered a severed facial nerve that may require surgery to repair, according to her lawyer Mason Pimsler.
The trouble was that Ramirez – professionally known as Madame Olga – was licensed by the state only as an esthetician to do makeup work and suggest over-the-counter medicines. She was not qualified to prescribe or administer drugs – or use the title ‘Dr.’ as she did on her business card.
So yesterday the Queens District Attorney, Richard Brown, shut down Madame Olga’s illicit medical practice and accused her of practising medicine with-out a license. ‘She operated with reckless disregard for the people who turned to her for help,’ said Brown. He alleged Montalvo was ‘temporarily disfigured’.
Investigators at Madame Olga’s home in College Point, her workplace for four years, seized hundreds of hypodermic needles, containers of medicines bearing the names ‘biopolymer’ and ‘biopolymere’, and a small amount of hormones. They are not sure what was in the injections given to Izadeli, but suspect it may have been a collagenlike substance.
‘All I know,’ said Izadeli, ‘is that I am very upset. It was a bad experience.’
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Here is another story where readers already knew that the woman had died on the operating table in the presence of a medical salesman. On the left is the news report of the campaign by the relatives. It is a valid piece of writing, but might be compared to the same story told in narrative style. There is a saving of 19 lines.
Relatives of a woman who died after a botched operation hope her death helps others live.
Lisa Smart, a 30-year-old financial analyst, died in 1997 at Manhattan’s Beth Israel Medical Center after routine outpatient surgery to remove a benign cyst.
A year later, the state Health Department blamed Smart’s death on negligence by two doctors, who used unfamiliar equipment and allowed a Johnson & Johnson salesman to assist with the operation.
One of the operating surgeons – her doctor’s partner – was on probation for a long list of violations.
Had this information been available, Smart might be alive today, her husband, Anderson Smart, said yesterday.
‘We don’t want this to happen to anyone else,’ said Smart, who travelled to Albany to press for a measure to give patients access to more information about their doctors.
Dubbed Lisa’s Law, the bill would require the state to provide a profile of each of the state’s licensed doctors, including information about lawsuits, their training and work history. The state collects the information, but does not make it available.
The bill has been introduced in the Assembly twice, but has gone nowhere.
The head of the Senate Health Committee, Sen. Kemp Hannon (R. Nassau), said he agrees there’s a need to provide patients with more information about doctors.
‘The trick is trying to balance what’s appropriate and what’s not going to deter physicians from practising in New York or turning down risky patients,’ said Hannon.
The powerful Medical Society of the State of New York remains fiercely opposed to providing information about malpractice lawsuits, insisting it’s an unfair gauge of competence.
‘Many of the best doctors have the worst malpractice experience, because they take the patients with the most difficult problems,’ said Liz Dears, a Medical Society lawyer.
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When Lisa Smart, a 30-year-old financial analyst, was wheeled into the surgery at Manhattan’s Beth Israel Medical Center for the removal of a benign cyst she did not know that one of the operating surgeons, her own doctor’s partner, was on probation for a long list of violations.
And she did not know that a Johnson & Johnson salesman would be there during the operation showing the doctors how to use new equipment.
Lisa died. The state Health Department blamed the two doctors for negligence.
Her husband travelled to Albany yesterday to press for ‘Lisa’s Law’, a bill to give patients the right to know about the lawsuits, training and work history of state licensed doctors – information the state collects but does not make available. ‘We don’t want this to happen to anyone else,’ said Anderson Smart.
Li
sa’s Law has been introduced twice in the assembly but has gone nowhere. The powerful Medical Society of the State of New York is fiercely opposed. ‘Many of the best doctors have the worst malpractice experience, because they take the patients with the most difficult problems,’ said Liz Dears for the Society. The head of the Senate Health Committee, Kemp Hannon (R.-Nassau) commented: ‘The trick is trying to balance what’s appropriate and what’s not going to deter physicians from practising in New York or turning down risky patients.’
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Here is a story which offers us a chance to experiment with different styles of newswriting. The original intro read:
A Brooklyn rabbi stole $6 million from the Board of Education by putting 81 no-show employees on the board payroll in a 20-year scam that benefited his religious school, Special Schools Investigator Ed Stancik charged yesterday.
This is a classic example of an overloaded intro, and one obsessed by source. You have to read it twice. And even then, it is not immediately apparent what the rabbi has been up to.
The story might have been treated in any one of three ways. On the left is a straight narrative style. On the right is a modified narrative which focuses on the three principals in the conspiracy. Both these treatments, as it happens, are shorter than the original report by some 37 lines. The narrative style, far from being longer, has saved space by the avoidance of repetition and incidental explanation.