Better English Writing - Geddes Grosset Webster’s Word Power 2014

What’s unique about writing for the media?
Writing for the media

When you are writing for the media, you don’t necessarily have the captive audience that you do when you are writing an academic essay or a work email. You have to grab your reader ’s attention, because you are competing with lots of other news features, articles, TV/radio programmes or blogs. Readers are like butter flies - they will flit from one piece of information to another. So how do you grab their attention and keep it? We are going to look at the following techniques to help you do this:

✵ who, what, how, where, when and why (the five Ws and an H)

✵ media style

✵ interviewing techniques

✵ house style

✵ ’spin’

The five Ws and an H

✵ Who is involved?

✵ What happened?

✵ How did it happen?

✵ Where did it happen?

✵ When did it happen?

✵ Why did it happen?

These are the time-honoured questions that journalists and media writers use to structure their writing. First, you grab the reader’s attention by creating a strong, dramatic introduction for maximum impact, and then you use the ’five Ws and an H’ structure keep their attention by providing the answers to these questions.

Example of ’five Ws and an H’

Here’s an example of a news report that uses this structure to describe Raisin Weekend - a traditional event that takes place every year at St Andrews University in Scotland.

Raisin Weekend high jinks at St Andrews

(Introduction)

Despite the freezing cold yesterday, hundreds of students at St Andrews University took part in a foam fight in St Salvator ’s Quadrangle, marking the end of the annual Raisin Weekend celebrations.

(Who)

This is a university tradition where new students - known as bejants and bejantines - are adopted and shown the ropes by an academic ’mother’ and ’father’, who are usually third-year students.

(What)

On the Sunday of Raisin Weekend, the ’parents’ throw a party to help all their ’children’ get to know each other. This is usually helped along by copious amounts of alcohol.

As a thank-you present, the children give their parents a bottle of wine - it used to be a pound of raisins. Academic fathers acknowledge this gift by giving their children a raisin ’receipt’. This was originally written in Latin on a piece of parchment, but now it’s written on an object that the student has to push or drag to the foam fight on Raisin Monday. And the mothers - as all good mothers do - dress their children up for the event.

Raisin receipts and costumes can be anything - the more outrageous and embarrassing the better. This year, one student was spotted pulling an old iron bedstead along behind him, wearing only a nappy.

(How)

So how did this crazy tradition start? Nobody seems quite clear. Some people think it’s only a century old, while others believe that it goes right back to the fifteenth century.

(Where)

Whatever its origins, Raisin Weekend creates mayhem in St Andrews, and this can sometimes cause tension between ’town’ and ’gown’. A Tesco employee grumbled: ’I don’t mind a bit of high jinks, but some of them are drunk and cause trouble in the shop. One student stole a couple of items. The police have been in and out all day!’ But the majority of the residents and visitors take it as a bit of a joke. Elinor Hay who was on holiday from Glasgow, said: ’I’ve just seen a young lad stark naked on top of the fountain in Market Street! I’ve not seen a gorgeous young body like that for twenty years - I went back for another look!’

Joe Brown, the President of the Student’s Union, commented: ’It’s a great

experience, and one that St Andrews graduates always remember. The combination of foam, grass and frost will always remind me of my first year at St Andrews. And the local pubs and hotels do a roaring trade, so it’s a win-win situation.’

(When)

Raisin Weekend takes place on the Sunday and Monday of the second weekend in November every year.

(Why)

The aim of this tradition is to help new students integrate into university life. Perhaps that’s when William and Kate got to know each other better ...

Media style

Newspapers, magazines, websites and blogs are not textbooks - they communicate information to readers who are probably on their way to or from work, or are catching up on the news during their lunch hour. They don’t have time to read the same sentence over three times because they don’t understand it. And if they don’t like what they’re reading, they’ll skip it and go to something else. So it’s back to plain English again - media style is crisp, concise, easy to understand - but also colourful and enjoyable to read. You’ll be competing with other news items, articles or columns, so your opening has to hook the reader in and make them want to read on. The ’five Ws and an H’ help with this, but establishing your own style or voice is important too.

Example of two openings

Compare these two openings, for example - which one is more likely to make you want to read on?

Opening A

Emily Dickinson was an American poet who lived from 1830-1886. She spent most of her life living in her family homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts - a town that still had a very Puritan culture. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was treasurer of Amherst College for nearly forty years, as well as being a lawyer and politician. Emily never married, but wrote prolifically, especially between the years 1861-1865. In 1862, she averaged a poem a day.

By the time of her death, she had written some eighteen hundred poems, though even her family didn’t know how many poems she’d written. Only around ten of her poems were published in her own lifetime, and she died unknown as a poet. Instead, she collected and sewed her poems into carefully crafted ’fascicles’, and stowed them away. From the 1860s, Dickinson had begun to withdraw from town life, and to dress entirely in white. Around 1869, when she was thirty-eight, Emily chose to stay permanently within the family’s home and grounds, never going beyond them. Her sister Lavinia discovered all of Emily’s poems when she died and, along with Mabel Loomis Todd, a neighbour, helped to publish them. A complete version of her works was only made available in 1955. Until then, versions of her poems available were often not very true to the original and made changes to her punctuation and style.

Opening B

’The Homestead’, in the centre of Amherst, Massachusetts, is an impressive brick structure built in the Feder al style. Upstair s, in a simply- furnished bedroom on the upper left of the house, a small writing desk - around 16 inches square - sits in the corner-room’s angle. The modest reality of this desk belies the importance of its former owner, who, during nights spent sitting before it, poured out a truly prolific body of poetry, and then put it away unseen in its drawers.

Emily Dickinson wrote some eighteen hundred poems before her death in 1886. She lived for almost her entire life in The Homestead, her family home, and, despite her reputation today, died almost unknown as a poet beyond its walls. Even her sister Lavinia, who knew of her writing, was surprised to discover, after Emily’s death, the volume of work locked in her desk.

Emily’s work came, for her innumerable fans, terrifyingly close to never seeing the light of day. But how could a writer of such genius have died with only around ten of her poems having ever been published? And why did the woman, famed in the public consciousness as a recluse dressed all in white, choose to confine herself in later life to the family grounds; to turn herself almost into a living-myth?

The answer to this may lie in considering Emily not just as a poet, but as a female poet. It’s hard to imagine today that Emily’s work could go unlauded during her lifetime, but the situation for a woman writer, much less one as uncompromising and challenging as Emily, was entirely different in the Puritanical landscape of 19th century New England. Woman writers during this period were stretching the traditional boundaries of what females were allowed to do in a very real way. Only a generation before, women writers were just about unheard of, and publication (the act of being made public) would be considered shameful for any woman - whose role was exclusively in the domestic sphere. Even in Emily’s day, the freedom to write, especially full time as she did, was hard-won.

Opening A fails to reveal the focus of the article, and you are none the wiser by the end of the paragraph. Is this a history of Emily Dickinson’s life? Is it a feature on people who became recluses? Or is it about women writers in 19th-century America? It’s difficult to tell. The writing is bland, with no structure or punch and there isn’t much of a hook to persuade the reader to persevere. Opening B sets an engaging scene and draws the reader in by asking interesting questions. The focus of the article is then introduced, the reader mentally goes ’Aaah, I see’ and settles down to find out more about the difficulties faced by American women writers in a culture where women were perceived as belonging only in the domestic sphere.

Interviewing techniques

If you are writing for the media, then you’ll need to inter view people. Interviews are a good way of gathering facts, opinions and stories from people. Quotations give your writing vitality and human interest, and they make it unique to you.

But how do you develop interviewing techniques? To begin with, you need the following qualities:

✵ persistence

✵ curiosity

✵ patience

✵ confidence

✵ empathy

✵ sensitivity

✵ enthusiasm.

If you interview somebody and you want them to open up to you, then you need to make eye contact, use friendly and open body language and look interested. They’re not going to engage with you if you come over as cold, bored or uncaring.

The following techniques will help you to carry out efficient and professional interviews.

Do your research

Find out everything you can about who you are going to interview - this will help you to feel confident and ask the right questions.

Plan and structure

What information are you trying to get? Plan the questions and structure of your interview to make sure that you get this information. You can always move away from this structure from time to time if a new idea or issue turns up, but you have the structure to return to.

Establish a rapport

You need to establish a rapport with the person you are interviewing, so it helps to be professional, businesslike, friendly, courteous and polite.

Ask open-ended questions

Phrase your questions carefully. If you ask closed questions - questions that only need a ’yes’ or a ’no’ answer - then the interviewee won’t have a chance to open up to you. So instead of asking ’Do you like the publicity that comes with your job?’ ask ’What do you think about the publicity that comes with your job?’

House style

Would you refer to the 1939-45 war as World War 2, World War II or the Second World War? Or how would you refer to the years 1980 to 1989 - the Eighties, eighties, 80s or ’80s? Is it organise or organize?

We all have our own preferences for words, phrases and spellings, but if we followed them it would be confusing for the reader, so most serious newspapers, magazines and media websites have what is known as a house style. This ensures that there is a uniform approach to the language used by writers and editors.

Example of house style

Here’s an example from a publishing house style guide:

captions

In general, captions do not need a full point afterwards.

Short captions look odd and old-fashioned with a full point afterwards - omit the full point.

Mixture of long and short captions - omit final point on all of them. In an informal text this is especially true.

In a more formal or technical text, with captions made up of several sentences, a full point at the end will probably look better. Use common sense.

caster sugar

Caster rather than castor. Both are right, however caster appears more often on modern packaging.

centuries

The 20th century, the 21st century. Hyphenate when adjectival, e.g. 21st- century boy.

20th Century Fox doesn’t hyphenate its name, leave it be if it is mentioned.

colon

Within a sentence, don’t follow a colon with a capital. Usually the first word following a colon looks better uncapitalised. However, if a full sentence follows the colon it will probably look better to cap up the first letter of that sentence.

In some display styles, it may look better to capitalise the first letter of the first word following the colon. Keep it consistent whatever ’s chosen.

Here are some examples of how we’ve used colons:

Arm discs: Also known as Delphin discs, arm

discs are available in adult and child sizes.

These are the modern take on inflatable arm

bands.

Before you get in the water:

Blow your nose. You should not swim with

a cold or with catarrh.

Keep going until you have gone a few

metres, then try moving in different

directions: sideways, backwards and in

circles.

commas

Try to avoid lots of unnecessary commas. Commas are used for parenthesis, lists and to avoid ambiguity not to indicate lots of pauses, which is very old fashioned.

company names

Companies and institutions are singular (the Bank of Scotland is, the school is, Vauxhall is, the government is).

Many company names have apostrophes in them: if in doubt, check the official website.

cross references

See pages 122-123. Italicise ’See/see’ and always have the word ’page’ written out in full, not p. or pg.

Most page references will be appearing in brackets. Put bracketed page reference inside an existing sentence.

Use an en dash between page references and shorten when there is repetition of the first numbers as follows:

123-4 not 123-24 or 123-124

23-4 not 23-24

267-79

267-345

Check out the The Guardian Style Guide on www.guardian.co.uk/styleguide/.

Ask to see the house style book or sheet of the newspaper, magazine or website you are writing for. Some might only be a page of A4, with very basic guidance, while others cover every question that a writer or editor is likely to ask. Most house styles will cover the following:

Preferred dictionary

Most media organisations tend to have a preferred dictionary that they use. These could include:

✵ The Oxford Dictionary

✵ Cambridge Dictionary

✵ Chambers Dictionary

• Collins Dictionary

The house style will probably state whether to use ’-ise’ or ’-ize’ verb endings.

Addresses, ages, dates and numbers

There will probably be rules to cover how you write addresses, a person’s age, dates and cash amounts.

Most newspapers and magazines spell out numbers one to ten in full, but use figures for 11 and over.

Collective nouns

It’s now generally accepted that most collective nouns use a single verb, as in the following:

The music society is charging a higher fee.

The government is deciding on the best policy.

There are some common exceptions, and these include the police, pop groups and football teams:

The police are asking for help to solve the crime.

The Rolling Stones are performing for one last time.

Manchester United are playing well just now.

Hyphens and en rules

Do you co-operate or cooperate? Co-ordinate or coordinate? Write Stratford-upon- Avon or Stratford upon Avon? House rules will tell you what to do.

Don’t confuse hyphens with en rules or em rules. These are used - like this - in parenthetical statements. Some organisations prefer to use the en rule - like this. It’s the width of a capital ’N’. Others prefer to use an em rule — like this. It’s the width of a capital ’M’.

Abbreviations, titles, capital letters and royalty

There will probably be a section on abbreviations in most house styles - for example, ie or i.e.?

Titles might be punctuated - for example, Dr., Mr. and Prof.. But names might not be - for example, JK Rowling.

There will be a style for when to use capital letters - too many can make a line

or heading difficult to read.

There will also be a style for addressing royalty - for example, HRH, HM, Her Royal Highness or Her Majesty.

Fonts and layouts

Finally, some media or ganisations will also state the fonts and l ayouts they prefer.

Style of language

We’ll look at style of language in more detail in the next section.

Spin

Spin is associated with the media, but what exactly is it?

One view of spin is that it is a way of presenting news or an incident to your audience to persuade them to see it from a particular perspective - usually to reduce the negative impact. So instead of saying, ’We failed 20 per cent of our targets’ you would say ’We met 80 per cent of our targets’. Or, instead of writing ’I failed this term’s chemistry test’ you would say ’I am learning from the mistakes I made in this chemistry test to help me achieve a top mark in my next test.’ You are turning a negative into a positive.

Spin is used a lot by public relations people in politics and the media. Often, when a celebrity makes a mistake or does something embarrassing, they employ a public relations officer to put a spin on events and lessen the impact. Some people therefore think that ’spin’ and ’spin doctors’ - the people who use spin - are manipulative and are not to be trusted.

If you use spin, you must consider the ethics involved. There are two different ways to look at it.

One view is that if you basically tell the truth but put a spin on it, then if the reader doesn’t ask questions or think about what you have written, that’s their fault and not yours.

The other view is that you are intentionally trying to control the way the reader interprets the facts by making them look at them in a more positive light.

Be careful about where, when and how much you use spin. Think of the purpose of your writing - is spin appropriate for your readers? If not, keep things simple and don’t use it.

Look out for examples of spin when you are reading or listening to anything in the media.