You’re probably asking
yourself, ‘why do I need a book on English for journalists? I’m a
novelist/a biographer/an essayist. What’s this got to do with me?’ Look at
it like this. If, as Harold Evans and Crawford Gillan claim, the journalist
and the text editor are the daily arbiters of our language, people with
enormous influence on how it’s used, who better to turn to for advice on how
to refine your work? You don’t have to be a journalist to get some benefit
from this book, and, if you’re not a journalist, rest assured it won’t
lead you into writing journalese.
Far
from it. You can look forward to reading some of the most exacting analysis of
how to use words and sentences effectively, from people who spend their
working lives trying to stamp out journalese.
Good newspaper English
has to be clear in its meaning, and succinct. Which means that the language
used must be specific, emphatic and concise. Evans and Gillan believe this
puts the good journalist firmly in the same camp as the likes of George
Bernard Shaw, Somerset Maugham and George Orwell, some of the greatest writers
of the twentieth century. There are few better places to be. To achieve this,
the authors set about showing us the basics, how to use sentences, and how to
use words. This may sound dull but it’s anything but. Simple sentences can
be used in surprisingly complex ways, without losing their clarity and without
being monotonous. And the advice to ‘use specifics, avoid abstractions,’
is accompanied by some horrible examples of what happens to writers who get
tangled up in the abstract. By the time you’ve thought about writing with
nouns and verbs, discarded those meaningless modifiers, and checked that you’re
using the correct meanings of those words, you’ll be looking at your own
writing in a completely different way, and you’ll be glad you took that
advice.
Every time I read this
book (and I think it’s a book that should be re-read often), I’m struck by
a new example of English gone wrong. In a world that’s awash with poor
usage, this is a book that sensitises the reader to the use of language. As
Evans observes, ‘Look after the words and style will look after itself.’
That’s what every writer needs to do, and this book is a good way of going
about it.
