Every journalist should develop his or her own style, avoiding clichés and stale formulae. In broadcasting, never forget that the words will be heard, not read. There is no better summary of the way the spoken word should be written than the advice given by George Orwell in his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language.
• Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print
• Never use a long word where a short word will do
• If it is possible to cut out a word, always cut it out
• Never use the passive where you can use the active
• Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent
• Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous
The English language is probably changing now more rapidly than it was in Orwell’s time. The internet is altering the way we absorb information and accelerating the globalisation of the language. Another new influence is texting. Most schoolchildren have mobile phones and seem to text each other all the time, in a specialist version of the language that has been invented in just a few years. Recently, a government minister urged parents to learn text language so that they can join in and communicate with their children more easily.
New words are admitted to the Oxford English Dictionary every year. In the most recent major review, no fewer than three thousand words were added, including many that spring from changing social trends, such as heightism, wussy, ladette, and bling-bling. A large number of new usages have emerged from the internet, including twitterati, to groom, cyberslacker (one who surfs the net at work), and data smog (the impenetrable mass of information available online).
Many young people are determinedly avoiding correct usage and cultivating a new, cool style. Anne Barnes, a senior GCSE examiner, reports that English papers are becoming riddled with ‘fashionable errors’, such as ‘gonna’ and ‘I was well bored’, and says one candidate even wrote his answers in text form. She made it clear that if u txt yr xms, u fail.
So in the years to come, there is likely to be a growing tension in broadcast journalism between the need to write and speak conversationally in a way that appeals to younger viewers and listeners, and the need for absolute accuracy, which many in the audience expect to hear in news programmes. There is no doubt that more and more writers are employing a less formal approach. But I am sure that slang and sloppiness should be avoided, no matter what kind of style an individual radio station or TV programme adopts. In the future, will we hear a political correspondent reporting, ‘The Prime Minister was like so not having it, and went like per-lease! And the Leader of the Opposition turns round and is like Doh! you know?’? I hope not.
I think it is more likely that broadcast journalists will have to develop new skills alongside the ability to write. These skills will be driven by new technology. They include the ability to help audiences to navigate through more and more information as web users get used to the idea of being able to go immediately to the information they want. In a presentation to the BBC ‘New Tools Festival’ in Belfast in 2009, the Executive Editor of the BBC College of Journalism, Kevin Marsh, expressed it like this.
As search engines become more sophisticated people want to go straight to the facts that are pertinent to them. Google and Yahoo now see themselves as media companies, but they don’t create anything. They connect people to what they are likely to want to know. So the big skill needed in modern journalism will be flexibility. Writing skills must be combined with the ability to direct or guide people through a blizzard of information.
Whatever the challenges of interactive and converging media, it is clear that writing well for TV and radio remains a core skill for broadcast journalists. Broadcast news has become the model of the spoken word, because it communicates clearly, concisely and precisely. We want all our listeners to follow the narrative effortlessly, and to be interested by it. We want all our viewers to follow the pictures easily, and to understand what they mean. And we want to be authoritative and respected. Good Spoken English carries with it credibility.
More than twenty-five years ago, the experienced BBC newsreader Andrew Timothy was asked to contribute to a BBC report on the standards of spoken English. He described his academic qualifications as negligible. But his conclusions have been widely endorsed by most commentators, and are still relevant today:
We know that English is a living language. We know too that if the language is to remain living and lively, it must change and adapt to circumstances in an ever-changing world. However, there are still such things as correct grammar, the right and wrong way to pronounce names and innumerable English words, some in daily use, others less well-known.
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If the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself for the battle?
(Corinthians I: XIV v.8)