Record of Column Writing

Moreshwar Bhalchandra Joshi’s column

 
published uninterruptedly for 750 days, and continuing

Pune-based senior journalist Moreshwar Bhalchandra Joshi has created a record of sorts. He is about 74 and has retired as special correspondent of Marathi daily Tarun Bharat years ago. As a freelance journalist, he has been writing a daily column for the last 26 months published by Sandhyanand, a newspaper belonging to the Aaj ka Anand group of newspapers. As of today, his column has appeared 750 times, without fail. (The number of today’s article is 750. It is actually close to 800 as the first 40 articles are not numbered as serial.)

So what is so special about it? It is the topic he covers. He writes only on cows. Are there enough subjects to write every day? Obviously, yes. Otherwise, Managing  Editor Anand Agarwal would not continue his column uninterruptedly and the readers would not continue to read the column. Joshi’s byline at the end of the article carries his email address mbjoshi31@yahoo.com and his mobile number 988177855. His mobile phone does not stop ringing for hours every morning after newspaper copies are delivered every where. The readers speak to him about types of cows the world over, quality of milk, use of gomutra (cow's urine), cow dung, their medicinal properties, increase in crop yield using cow dung manure and gomutra as pesticide and insecticide and so on. He has documented these in his articles. Feedback from his readers offers him new insights for his articles because many of them are Ayurved practitioners who have tried these for medicines and for inputs for farming.

His column in the Sandhyanad is a dialogue with farmers in Maharashtra. He took up this subject when he realised that the farmers use chemical fertilizers spending Rs 20.000 to 40,000  per acre for sugarcane and such other cash crops and less for dry farming or semi-dry farming. Thus, almost every village spends Rs two crores to Rs four crores per year for this harmful farming. As against this, the use of desi cow dung and gomutra has been proven to be a healthy way of producing crops and at negligible cost.

Moreshwar has taken up the cause of spreading the message of using the manure prepared as follows: Use ten kilos of cow dung  (of Indian desi cow, internationally called Zebu) for a one-acre farm. Add half a kilo of honey and a quarter of kilo of zebu ghee in it. Put these three elements in one hundred litres of water and spray it on one-acre crop field after the sowing and the crop has just come up. He explains that this mixture is known as amrutpani. The farmer should repeat the same dose every two months to cash crop is like sugarcane. There are other two or three requirements for such cultivation.  

Farmers of one hundred villages have followed Moreshwar Joshi’s Sandhyanand column in, there are where this type of cultivation is done on large scale using amrutpani. Almost not a single village is left in the area where this method is not practised.

He has written almost one thousand articles on zebu cow. Of these, two hundred articles are of 1000 to 2000 words besides these and 800 articles of 250 to 300 words. His experience is that the farmers find smaller articles are easy to read.

Moreshwar, a village boy from Masur in Satara district, was my classmate at the Department of Communication and Journalism, the University of Pune which we joined on July 15 in 1969. We became journalists in Pune thereafter, and have been next-door neighbours for the last four decades. Yet I was not aware that he has become such an authority on cow till he was felicitated by the Vasantrao Naik Krushi Sanshodhan Pratishthan carrying a cash award of Rs 21,000 and a citation for his documentation and journalistic writing on the cow.

Very modestly he gives credit for his newfound readership to Anand Agarwal who has asked him to limit his column to about 250 to 300 words plus a photograph. This has led to ever-increasing fan following for Moreshwar. The Managing Editor is obviously right as proved by the ABC-certified circulation figure of  2,78,839. Such a high sale is significant because the cover price is Rs seven per copy, the highest among the dailies in Pune.

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Kiran Thakur

20.07.2010

A School Student Reviews Newspaper English

I am extremely happy that a young reader has used such nice words about my the book ‘Newspaper English.’  I am more delighted to know that this reader is a grade 7 student from a Pune school.

My compliments to him, Vihang Vidwans, his parents and his school teachers. I have not come across such a young student who reads a book on Writing Plain and Clear, and Simple! 

Book Review: NEWSPAPER ENGLISH

Vihang Wrote:

Certainly ‘Newspaper English’ is the right book, coming at the right time, and in the right place. The book tackles the issue of lack of simple English in newspapers.

Prof. Thakur also examines the related issues of long leads, use of passive voice and the use of journalism clichés.

He investigates the problem by presenting infallible evidence by means of the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid grade-level tests.

The chain of reasoning provided in this book is compatible with the highest modern standards of rigour. The text is also a useful guide for teachers and students.

The methods used in this book are easy-to-use and simple. 

It is this reviewer’s personal opinion that the ‘Rule of Thumb’ should be widely popularised.

All in all, the book proves to be a delightful counterpoint between infallible proofs and simple remedies to the issues found, not to mention the unique coda formed by the appendices.

-Vihang Vidwans, Grade 7,

Dr Kalmadi Shamarao High School, Ganesh Nagar, Pune.

Newspaper English: reviewed by Dr Uma Shankar Pandey,

Newspaper English by Prof Dr Kiran Thakur

‘Global Media Journal, Indian Edition Volume 11, Issue 1, June 2019

Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal’

http://gmj.manipal.edu/

Book published by Vishwakarma Publications, Pune 2019

Price Rs 225; Pages – 172 (Available online at Amazon)

Reviewed by Dr Uma Shankar Pandey, Associate Professor, Department of Journalism and Mass Communication Surendranath College for Women, Kolkata; (mailusp@gmail.com)

Renowned British linguist Roger Fowler once famously described language as ‘not a clear window but a refracting and structuring medium’. There are different ways of saying the same thing; different expressions carry ideological distinctions.

Many popular journalists use specific words and grammatical devices to make some events appear more significant while downplaying the importance of others. Through skilful use of language, it is possible to render certain issues and events more significant to the readers, and at other times to make it appear less significant.

Language forms take on particular meanings in specific contexts. In certain situations, a statement could simply represent a fact while in other circumstances it could even be interpreted as a challenge. Certain texts open up the possibility of interaction with the participants while others impede such participation. Apart from these more sophisticated concerns, it is vital for young journalists and writers to be aware of the more mundane pitfalls of obtuse and turgid writing.

Writing techniques do not get the importance they deserve in most Indian universities and institutions offering media studies. The result is many young writers and journalists are seriously deficient in professional writing skills. Apart from Jyoti Sanyal’s extremely useful book on writing good Indian English, there are very few available Indian texts on writing more readable articles for newspapers. Dr Kiran Thakur drawing on his vast experience as a journalist and researcher has come up with this extremely useful book.

Starting with the well-known 21-point Oxford Guide to Plain English and Robert Gunning’s Ten Principles of Clear Writing, Thakur provides an interesting backdrop to his own passion for writing simple English. As a news agency journalist for many years, he had to write simple so that the English piece could be easily translated by non-English sub-editors into regional languages. Another important parameter was —not to let the intro exceed 25 words.

The first chapter starts off with tips for editing out unnecessary words. The author provides an interesting technique — described as Thakur’s rule of the thumb — to seek out unnecessary words and phrases. If you cover a word or a phrase with your thumb and the sentence still makes sense, the covered word or phrase can be deleted.  

The second chapter provides an accessible introduction to the relative advantages of various readability indices. The Flesch-Kincaid Readability Ease formulae, for example, is useful for writers since it helps decide whether your article will be actually read. The Gunning Fox Index, on the other hand, is used to provide a second opinion in case the Flesch-Kincaid test gives ‘bizarre results’. The SMOG index is valuable since it can be measured without the use of computers. A very useful tip from the author is to use the proofing option in Microsoft Word to calculate the Flesch Reading Ease and the Flesch Kincaid Grade Level, along with the percentage of Passive Sentences used in a piece. Though purists regard this technique as blunt, it nonetheless provides an accessible insight into readability.

Chapter 3 of the book provides interesting insights into the methods adopted to make writing easier to understand. Thakur takes intros from different English newspapers to first demonstrate using the Flesch Reading Ease and the Flesch Kincaid Grade Level, the turgidity in the prose. He then performs basic sub-editing on the intros — removing the redundant words and unnecessary detail and splitting up larger sentences into two or three. This generally improves the readability indices substantially.

As part of Thakur’s research, readers were provided with the two versions of the intros and asked to choose the one they found more readable. In most cases, the readers chose the edited version, which in turn had a higher readability index. In the same chapter, he demonstrates the futility of using more ‘difficult words’.

This demonstration of the existence of obtuse intros in existing newspapers is novel and interesting. It is also a reminder of the need for innovative pedagogies for writing classes in journalism schools. The importance of shorter, simpler, concise and active sentences needs to be demonstrated in the classroom in as many interesting ways as possible. The use of the simple proofing indicators on the word processing software is repeated elsewhere in the book. If students and readers make it a regular habit to check the Flesch Reading Ease and the Flesch Kincaid Grade Level, it will provide them instant feedback about their writing. Though not a conclusive method by any means, it is an important indicator to measure their progress towards better readability.

Chapter 4 of the book discusses the problems with using subsidiary clauses at the beginning of sentences. Using the same techniques described in earlier chapters, the author removes unnecessary subsidiary clauses, from carefully selected articles, and splits the longer sentences into shorter ones. This is followed by turning on the MS Word proofing tools to corroborated higher Flesch Reading Ease and a lower Flesch Kincaid Grade Level for the edited versions. A lower FKGL is always more desirable. If for an article the FKGL is eight, for example, an eighth grader can easily read and decipher the article.

The next chapter of the book illustrates the other common writing pitfalls — the uninformed use of adjectives and adverbs, redundant words, jargons, officialese and clichés.

Rather than providing staid prescriptions on writing, the author skillfully demonstrates the differences in the good and the bad versions and invites the readers to validate the readability indices themselves, with the use of very simple computer proofing tools.

Another welcome technique in the book is the use of current articles from Indian newspapers. This provides a more recognisable context to the readers.

The book is a welcome addition to original books on Indian journalism in recent times. The use of a demonstrable technique for young writers to increase the readability of their articles is an important contribution of the book.

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