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An ounce of pretention,
a pound of obscure
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Writers' mangled or
misplaced attempts at literary
elegance
can confuse and annoy newspaper readers.
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By Matthew Crowley
John
McIntyre’s audience of copy editors laughed when he said “crepuscular.”
Though they’d been reading and editing copy for years, some of them, it seemed, had
never seen such a word, or heard it. McIntyre argued they shouldn’t have seen “crepuscular”
in their newsrooms, even if he did once.
In his seminar “That Crepuscular Light: Ornamental Language and Metaphor” at the
American Copy Editors Society’s ninth-annual conference in Hollywood, McIntyre said
striving to make the newspaper writing lively and interesting is admirable.
| ''THAT CREPUSCULAR LIGHT: ORNAMENTAL LANGUAGE AND METHAPHOR,'' presented by John
McIntyre, Baltimore Sun |
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But, he said, language must fit its context. And though
writers may ambitiously try for elegance, they may also fall flat, McIntyre said.
“If you are going to attempt literary writing, you are going to get judged by literary
standards,” McIntyre said. “And the problem is writers are not the best judges of
their work.”
Armed with examples, mostly from his own Baltimore Sun, McIntyre demonstrated literary-writing
tries gone awry. One example, which inspired the seminar’s title, went:
“This is the edge intact,” Read exclaims, gingerly touching two dusty 205-year-old
bricks near the kitchen where Peckersgill – the woman who in 1813 made the star-spangled
banner that inspired Francis Scott Key to pen his poem in the crepuscular light –
cooked meals for her family.”
The paragraph has many problems, McIntyre and the class agreed, including overstating
the obvious (where else would someone cook meals but a kitchen?). But the choice
of “crepuscular” stood out particularly.
Finding “crepuscular,” which means resembling twilight or dim, in poetry by T.S.
Eliot or Wallace Stevens wouldn’t seem strange, McIntyre suggested. The poets might
be sending a message to their readers by using it: If you don’t get this word, you’re
not learned.
If reporters use the word, they’re also sending a message, McIntyre said.
“You put this word in a daily newspaper that’s meant to go to the widest possible
audience, you’re telling the reader that we don’t know who you are,” McIntyre said.
“(You’re saying) we don’t know how to write to our audience and that we’re irritatingly
pretentious.”
McIntyre pointed out many language-usage misfires:
-- Ill-advised humor: “This year the county’s police department got
caught with its pants down. A sergeant was convicted of sexually assaulting a woman
in his patrol car.” (Sexual assault isn’t something to trivialize).
-- Out-of-place wordplay: A surname pun in a serious (and grim) assault
story: “His name may be Jolly, but an Elkridge man ended up in court after he tried
to wipe the smile from his wife’s face.”
-- What-is-it-doing-here color that buries a point: “Her long hair framing
her overheated face in the humid evening warmth, a determined Jennifer Cash worked
at moving a brightly colored liquid-filled ball past an opposing squad of players
at Alpha Ridge Park’s makeshift roller hockey rink.” (Poor readers. They must go
35 words into the paragraph to learn that the story’s about roller hockey).
-- Mixed and mangled metaphors: “The world’s largest spice producer, insulated
by an armor of takeover safeguards adopted this summer, is sitting comfortably on
the sidelines awaiting the fallout from the takeover free-for-all embroiling the
station’s food industry.” (Armor? Sidelines? Free-for-all? Sounds like a Renaissance
Fair polo match gone awry, not modern business.)
Fixing these faux pas comes next. Trouble is, writers may not like hearing that their
bursts of creativity have failed, McIntyre warned.
“The combination of vanity and ineptitude is particularly deadly,” McIntyre said.
“People fall in love with the most grotesquely inappropriate creations.”
When a story’s a real train wreck, full of mind-splitting manglings, McIntyre said
he’ll go to the assigning editor and ask to get the story reworked.
Sometimes, though, that doesn’t solve the problem. Inappropriate copy may reach the
desk because an assigning editor finds passing a story forward easier than confronting
a difficult reporter.
If bad text becomes the desk’s problem, and if a writer argues that a right to untouched
copy comes with a byline, McIntyre says “no.” The byline represents the primary
work of reporting and writing that a writer did, McIntyre said. But the story belongs
to the paper; it owns the copyright and gets to determine whether a story's content,
tone and language fit.
If stories truly belonged to reporters, McIntyre argued, it would be up to reporters
to defend themselves if a story brought a libel lawsuit.
“You would not want your editor to say to you, ‘Well I see that you have a problem
with your story and I think that you had better get yourself a lawyer,’ ” he said.
“You want the paper to say ‘It’s our story. We stand by it and we will defend you.’
”
Matthew Crowley is a business copy editor for the Las Vegas Review-Journal. |
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