Angry editor: How not to run a newsroom, Part Three.
“One hundred and thirty-seven!” he shouted. “That sentence has 137 words!”
For someone who prides himself on being a superb photographer and writer, the true forte of this Cambodian website’s managing editor seemed more for counting and remembering numbers. He certainly never forgot that particular number and he reminded me of it on several occasions.
“Your sentence had 137 words!” he would yell when he was feeling particularly upset about something or another. “The Phnom Penh Post would fire you for writing a sentence like that!”
It did not matter to this managing editor that the sentence was well crafted, grammatically correct and perfectly punctuated. It was immaterial to him that it clearly and simply explained a complex series of interrelated concepts in the briefest way possible. He only cared about the number of words between the first capital letter and the full stop.
“One hundred and thirty-seven!”
True, for today’s online media a certain exaggerated brevity seems to be required, based on the well-supported assumption that by its nature the internet is shrinking attention spans. Short and sensational statements best catch a “netizen’s” fleeting curiousity. To follow up, the copy is kept brief and shallow so as to not lose the attention too soon.
This is not necessarily a bad thing for the language. English is nothing if not fluidly adaptable, having been born from the mating of West Germanic and Celtic tongues and evolving with contributions from French, Latin, Norse, Hindi and numerous others. That adaptability has, in part, been responsible for making English the world’s lingua franca and has allowed it to be effectively used in varied styles, from romantic poetry to technical instructions.
That means English is also ideally suited for baiting click traps, luring fully-suspecting readers with “The worst/best English words!” or “The ultimate guide to bad grammar!” There is obviously room for that.
However, problems occur not when the language adapts to new media, but when journalistic standards of accuracy and comprehensiveness are sacrificed to lowered expectations. This is not new. When television allowed broadcasters to titillate rather than inform, some journalism became mere gossip. Infotainment was born. If facts now become useful mainly as fodder for clickbait the same danger arises. If a news report is only meant to hold a reader’s attention long enough to dangle the next piece of bait in front of her eyes, then the full story is not told. Accuracy, full understanding and journalistic courage are all lost.
This is not to say there’s anything in itself wrong with being brief – on the contrary. Excessive wordage muffles meaning. However, brevity is relative and cannot always be measured simply by counting the words in any particular sentence.
Take that 137-word sentence as an example. If the several subordinate clauses were hived off to form their own sentences, they would have needed lengthening to make them grammatical. That would have increased the number of words and possibly decreased clarity.
On the other hand, as was actually done, if the subordinate clauses are separated from the whole, but left essentially the same with only the first words capitalized and some commas changed to periods, that creates a confusing series of incomplete sentences. In effect, it remains a 137-word sentence, but now it’s improperly punctuated and largely incomprehensible.
A managing editor who boasts of unmatched skills and superiority over all his reporters in all matters should perhaps learn to exercise a little introspection and self-editing. For the sake of improving staff morale and the publication in general it would help for him to recognize that his employees might know how to write, even if it’s different from the way he writes, and that they even may be able to teach him a thing or two.
In addition, an editor who demands the utmost perfection from his writers should perhaps first ensure that he himself is the embodiment of that perfection, incapable of making any mistakes. A good editor should recognize that his own work might need editing, especially if he has a tendency to compose in sentence fragments. For a start, he should not take a clear and concise passage describing the effects of a storm that has already passed, change it and publish it online as this:
“As Super Typhoon Mangkhut (known in the Philippines as Typhoon Ompong) continues its path of destruction the damaged fields and paddocks of Luzon, among others, doesn’t auger well for a country already in the grips of a food crisis, with the departing storm threatening to multiply possible malfeasance by the country’s National Food Authority (NFA) and its chief administrator.”
On the bright side, that sentence, if one could call it such, only contains 59 words.
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