Book Review: by Mahesh Vijapurkar
‘Newspaper English’ authored
by Kiran Thakur
India is home to the world’s
largest population of English-speaking people outside of the United Kingdom and
the United States of America. India is home also to the world’s largest
newspaper by circulation or readership, The
Times of India. Though spoken English is substantively influenced by the
Indian speaker’s mother tongue, there are many ‘English only’ families where
their mother tongues have weakened or forgotten.
Compared to how she is spoken in UK
and UK – clipped British accents and the American drawl, using different
spellings for the same word, some pronounced differently as well – the Indian
English different. Indian words, mostly from Hindi, have made their way into
the eminent dictionaries to be part. If mulligatawny
crept into English dictionaries more than a century ago, jugad found a place in the Oxford
Dictionary in 2017.
That does not mean English can or
should be written in any manner one likes for there are rules of grammar. The
rules are meant to provide some order and clarity. Clarity is derived from
simplicity. Bombast and rhetoric are acceptable in a speech from a public
platform, “Hand over a bouquet to the chief guest” sounds nicer and digestible
even from the podium than “pay floral tributes”.
But, when writing news for a
newspaper, the clarity is a result of simple, smaller words. The small words
carry as much weight as heavy words do. One should read Hemmingway’s The Old Man and the Sea to understand
the impact of such writing; the reader can race through the book with ease
without searching out a word’s meaning from any dictionary. Of course, local,
colloquial terms used which provide the atmosphere are a different thing.
Kiran Thakur’s labour of love Newspaper
English[i]drives
home this point where he makes the following points: write brief sentences,
short paragraphs, and avoid the urge to make the copy long. Dr Thakur[ii]
as a journalist has been a practitioner of that kind of writing from the time
he started working in the United News of India (UNI) and his later switch to
academics, including research has not dimmed his enthusiasm for such writing.
He sees value in simple writing,
and when he moved to teaching journalism as Head, Department of Communication
and Journalism, Savitribai Phule University, Pune, he wore this objective on
his sleeve. Now an adjunct faculty at FLAME University dealing with research,
he took this work with passion and is the result of a seven-year-long effort,
aided by the University Grants Commission. The content of the work and the
credentials of the author make this book valuable. It is actually the academic
study brought out as a boo.
When competing with the Press Trust
of India (PTI) one had to be not only quick and but clear. The copy in English
had to be understood by the small town’s local language newspaper deskmen whose
job it is to translate the news into their respective languages. The process
had to be quick, especially when deadlines were close. The speed of transmission
and typesetting now available does not, however, eliminate the need for
simplicity of writing.
Once in print, the news item has a
function to perform. As Martin Cutts underlines in the foreword, “The first
paragraph must provide the gist of the story and help them decide whether to
bother reading any further. Nobody in the history of newspapers has ever read
the second paragraph first. Readers only reach the second paragraph if the
first has hooked them.” Also, “if you don’t get to the point immediately, your
readers will go elsewhere”.
That said, it is the experience of
most readers of most newspaper that to get to the point he has to wade through
several lines of one or two sentences in the first paragraph and barely get an
inkling of the story. It is apparently wrongly assumed these days that the
headline itself is the equivalent of the lead – Americans call it the lede –
and stick to clutter of words that slows down the pace of reading and
understanding. Readability is the true test of any writing.
A newspaper reader is not going to
settle down with the day’s edition as if there was enough time to traverse from
big paragraphs of long words in lengthy stories from column to column, and then
page to page. His attention span is decreasing, and alternative outlets for
news are available on the Internet on the mobile phones. Mobile Apps provide
digests and mistakenly the news consumer has the mistaken belief that what
arrives on the WhatsApp is as good as what a newspaper should be providing.
Newspaper English, therefore,
has been brought out at probably the best time and help sensitise the news
writers to change their ways. It is a useful in that context. Also, despite the
large English-knowing population, it has to be understood that the newspaper is
not bought only by the highbrow readers but has to serve the needs of the
lowest common denominator in that section of the population. It is hard to
secure the return of a reader to a newspaper to which he has cancelled the
subscription.
Thakur has painstakingly provided a
plethora of examples, each detailed and listing the inadequacies of style and
structure of the news in the publications. His analysis is dispassionate, he
has named newspapers from where the examples are cited. He advocates explicitly
and implicitly the style of the news agencies and correctly insists that “it is
easier …to switch over from the style of a news agency to that of a newspaper,
but not the other way around.”
My tongue-in-cheek response to
that, however, could be: Dr Thakur, do you mean it is easier to teach students
the best practices but difficult for them to unlearn the bad practices now
common in newspapers?” That dig apart, I agree with that contention. He has
carried out readability tests using several tools available on the Internet and
his conclusion is valid: newspapers should not only encourage simple writing
but insist on it as a style requirement. But Indian newspapers are not known to
have stylebooks. Not even a good do’s and don’ts.
Newspaper English has
a nicely designed cover by Dr Nachiket Thakur which is as subdued and
attractive as the simple writing advocated in the pages within. This book
should be a must read for all journalism students and the faculties that try to
shape them, and for the heads of the reporting and editing departments of all
English-language newspapers. In the absence of stylebooks, this would serve as
a guidepost.
Book Author: Prof Dr
Kiran Thakur
--
Reviewed by
Mahesh Vijapurkar
Former Deputy Editor, The Hindu
Reviewed by
Mahesh Vijapurkar
Former Deputy Editor, The Hindu
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03, Indrayani, Patrakarnagar, Pune 411016
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Title of the Book
Newspaper English
Publisher: The Vshwakarma Publications, Pune
https://vishwakarmapublications.com/product/newspaper-english/
No. Of Pages: 172, Price: Rs. 225.00 US $ nine
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