Monday, July 24, 2006
A tiresome style of writing
A copy editor sent this note:
I've been running into this kind of thing in AP stories, and I find it irritating:
He opened the session by improvising on hymns at the piano and concluded it by accompanying a sing-along on the guitar. In between, he delivered a compelling account of his unlikely conversion from atheism to evangelical Christianity.
The lanky, amiable platform personality wasn’t some traveling revivalist but one of the world’s leading biologists.
I didn't think he was a traveling revivalist; was the writer trying to trick me into thinking he was, so he could surprise me?
Writers who try to mislead the reader in the lead must not realize that the headline, photos and cutlines will already have revealed the "surprise" before the reader even gets to the story.
This was in another AP religion story the other day:
The arena crowd was on its feet, arms in the air, dancing to the lively beat. Colored lights flashed on the performers, who belted out some of their most popular songs.
But these fans weren’t teenagers, and the attraction wasn’t a hot pop act. Two of the four performers, in high-wedge platform sandals and trendy but modest outfits, were obviously pregnant. And many fans were middle-aged men.
How surprising! People besides teenagers go to concerts!
The copy editor is right. This sort of writing is tiresome. It is tiresome not only because of the I-fooled-you gimmickry, but also because of the clichés and because of the empty phrases that the writers assume are descriptive.
Politically correct nonsense
The other day I heard a radio announcer refer to the composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor as an “African-American.” I didn’t think the man was an American, so I looked him up.
He was born in England.
The announcer just couldn’t bring himself to say that Coleridge-Taylor was of mixed race, the son of a white woman and a black man.
Timid writers make the same sort of error.
They would do well to heed this thought from Bryan Garner: “In the end, euphemisms leave a linguistic garbage-heap in their wake: once they become standard, they lose their euphemistic quality and must be replaced by newer euphemisms.”
That quotation comes from Mr. Garner’s e-mail newsletter, Garner's Usage Tip of the Day, for Oxford University Press.
