The Writing of News: A Handbook with Chapters on Newspaper Correspondence and Copy Reading

Of the three generally recognized qualities of good style—clarity, force and grace—it is the last and the last alone in which critics of newspaper English find their material. It would be ludicrously superfluous to illustrate here the prevailing clearness of what one reads in the daily press. To it everything else is sacrificed. He who runs through the pages of his paper at a speed that keeps even pace with that of his car or train, and yet understands what he reads, without difficulty and without delay, would give short hearing to a complaint on this score. The same assertion may safely be made of the second of the trio of good qualities. Whenever and wherever force is needed, the reporter, no matter what his limitations of time and distracting circumstances, manages to put it into his writing.

The result is plain—and inevitable. Beauty, grace, suggestion of that final touch which confers upon its object the immortality of perfect art, are nearly always conspicuously absent. We know at a glance what has happened and we get the force of whatever significance the writer has wished to impress, but it is all hurled at our heads in the same wholesale fashion, with the same neglect of “form,” that the genuine American is accustomed to in his quick-lunch resort, and, in his heart, really likes. ... Without intending to be dogmatic about it, we are inclined to say that, if a newspaper’s English makes a fair approach to the level of an educated, intelligent man’s serious conversation, it will be doing about all that can justly be expected. Whatever it accomplishes more than this is to its credit.—From an editorial in the New York Evening Post.

“Newspaper English” has often been used as a term of reproach, as if the newspapers, by concerted action, had been guilty of creating an inferior, trademarked brand of English for their own purposes. The term has been hurled indiscriminately at all newspapers, the good as well as the bad, and young writers have been warned in a vague, general way to beware of the reporter’s style. As applied to loosely edited newspapers the criticism is just. It is not true, however, that “newspaper English” constitutes a special variety of language, to be shunned by all who would attain purity in writing. There are good books and bad books, just as there are good newspapers and bad newspapers, and it would be as reasonable to condemn all books because they are written in a “bookish” style as it is to include all news writing in a sweeping condemnation.

No defense is needed of the style of writing in the well-edited modern newspaper. Free from pedantry and obsolete expressions, the English of the best newspapers fulfills its purpose of telling the news of the day in language that all can understand. Newspaper English has not been created by the newspapers alone. It is the language of the people, clarified and simplified in the writing, as opposed to the language of an earlier day which obscured the writer’s thought in a maze of high-sounding words. Newspaper English, at its best, is nothing more nor less than good English employed in the setting forth of news. At its worst it embodies the common faults of writing.

The reporter writes his story for readers of all degrees of intelligence—for the man whose only reading is newspapers and for the man of cultivated taste. Simplicity is the keynote. This does not mean crudity or slovenliness, for while the good news story is written with the limitations of the least intelligent reader in mind, it should not offend the educated reader. In this respect the Bible, the simplest of all books, is an excellent model for the news writer.