Jim Stasiowski, writing
Writing coach Jim Stasiowski welcomes your questions or comments.
Call him at
(775) 354-2872
or write to:
2499 Ivory Ann Drive
Sparks, NV 89436.
On a recent Sunday, I was watching my NFL team, the Baltimore Ravens, struggle against the New York Jets.
The game ended up a depressing fourth loss in a row for the Ravens, but at least I got one benefit from it, when, in the middle of the second half, with the outcome still in doubt, the play-by-play fellow said that the Ravens were “trying to snap a three-game losing streak.”
“Wrong!” I shouted, rising to my full (yet modest) height from my chair. (Writing coaches perversely love such mistakes.)
It is true that the Ravens had lost their three previous games. But, in fact, their “three-game losing streak” ended when they had lost the previous Sunday to the New York Giants. What the announcer meant was that the Ravens were “trying to end their losing streak at three games.”
I bring up the sloppiness of TV-sports coverage because sloppy usage begins somewhere, and lots of people, including lots of hard-news editors and reporters, watch and listen to sports broadcasts. It’s human nature: Whether we want to or not, we tend to imitate usages we hear.
Writing, whether for a newspaper, a postcard, a blog or a novel, is the assigning of words or phrases to ideas, actions or facts. As Jacques Barzun wrote in his book “Simple & Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers,” imitation can be deadly, especially when our choices are reflexive, based on bad usages that are repeated until they become standard:
“Such words and phrases are vague from the start or become so by vogue – overuse. They are in our heads because they are in fashion at the time.”
The sloppy “X-game losing streak” is among the most common errors.
I know, I know: People watching the Ravens-Giants game that day knew exactly what the announcer meant, so I should just butt out. But although TV announcers can get by with such almost-accurate statements – their words evaporate instantaneously – newspaper reporters require a higher standard, for our words live on.
If you watch any televised sports, you already know about the post-outcome interview. The interviewer, usually well-groomed and self-assured, can be counted on to ask the winner: “What does this victory mean to you?”
“It means a lot,” the winner will say, unless he decides to go really profound and say, “It means everything.”
I accept that those post-game interviewers have to hurry madly to grab someone to talk to, and I further recognize that viewers aren’t expecting lengthy analyses. My concern is more with the proliferation of such worthless interviews. I worry about Barzun’s point that with such inanities cemented in our brains, we in newspapers will, as we have in the past, fall into the trap of imitating TV.
But it’s not just TV that implants meaningless blather in our brains. The 2016 political season is rife with the same kind of nonsense. In your city, county or state elections, how many candidates have promised the magic phrase “economic development”?
That’s the cheapest of the cheap pledges, but did reporters look into the specifics? Did editors demand such investigation? “Economic development” often comes with large price tags, such as the loosening of development regulations and the concomitant risks to the environment, or the granting of tax-increment financing, which can drain tax revenues for local governments.
How about the pledge, “No new taxes”? I heard a lawmaker explain to constituents why she voted against a tax increase that passed. Her reasoning had nothing to do with whether the new tax would benefit the state. Her sole rationale: Because she had run on a platform of “no new taxes,” she simply had to vote “Nay.” She could not turn her back on that pledge, no matter how reasonable the new tax was.
In the coverage of her original election, shouldn’t we – and I include myself in this criticism – have made her answer for the possibility that some new tax in some circumstance she couldn’t foresee would be a positive for her constituents?
What we all have to be vigilant about is the tendency to hear a familiar statement or phrase and assume that, by its familiarity, it has achieved legitimacy. To go back to Barzun: “If you observe yourself when on the point of writing, you will notice that the words rising spontaneously to your mind are not the hard, clear words of a lover of plain speech, but this mush of counterfeits and clichés.”
THE FINAL WORD: Speaking of the silliness that springs from the coverage of sports, let’s erase “legendary” from our vocabulary.
As the dictionary points out, the adjective “‘legendary’ refers to something that may have a historical basis in fact but, in popular tradition, has undergone great elaboration and exaggeration.”
There have been athletes who fit that description – tales of Babe Ruth often seem stretched beyond what has been confirmed – but most excellent athletes of the modern era, even Michael Jordan and Michael Phelps, have had their histories carefully recorded.
What election results might portend for 1st Amendment
Gene Policinski, inside the First Amendment
Gene Policinski is chief operating officer of the Newseum Institute and senior vice president of the Institute’s First Amendment Center. He can be reached at gpolicinski@newseum.org.
Follow him on Twitter:
@genefac
For nearly two years, the nation has been through an exhausting process of sorting through possible candidates, selecting nominees and choosing those to be elected to offices high and low, local and state and national.
In many ways, such a season ends in a glory day for our First Amendment freedoms. Voting is the ultimate result of the constitutional protections of our core freedoms expressed in the First Amendment: the governed selecting those who, until the next election, are charged with governing on our behalf.
There is a reason we protect political speech above all other categories: It’s one of the essential parts of how our nation works, even when for many people, it’s effectively “not working.” The process remains the envy of the world, which periodically places it in the crosshairs of adversaries who would tear it down, now in ways we have not seen before.
Debate, discussion, disagreement and discourse are the ways we exchange our ideas in the public square — sometimes bitterly and angrily, to be sure. We also know from history that this oft-messy method has, over time, meant a continual renewal of our nation and its values, and improvement of the lives of our fellow citizens.
In more direct First Amendment terms, in our elections, we decide who responds to our petitions for change. Many of us during these long months of the 2016 presidential race have assembled to make our voices heard — either through actual assemblies and rallies, or through the increasingly common online communities formed by social media. For some people, tenets of faith or prayers for divine guidance will help us in deciding for whom to vote.
Through it all the press — with more participants than ever before — has been there to report, record, repeat, reproach or repost what candidates and the public are saying to and about each other.
To the regret of many people, it sometimes seems that the press has been in the news during this campaign season as often as reporting it.
Witness the latest example: the emotional criticism Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the U.S. House, directed at Fox News’s Megyn Kelly — and by extension, the news media in general — for being “fascinated with sex” over substantive issues. He immediately paired that, without irony, to an inquiry as to why former president Bill Clinton’s name isn’t as synonymous with the term “sexual predator” as Gingrich said is the case with GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Add in Trump’s outright attacks on journalists and news outlets in the harshest terms; the disdain earlier in the campaign from Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s months-long gap between press conferences, and criticism in polls and at rallies of the working press; Trump’s earlier conflict with Kelly over his post-debate remark about “blood coming out of her wherever;” and his threat to use the presidency to weaken libel laws to make it easier for himself and other public figures to sue journalists and their news organizations.
The Nov. 8 election results settled who got into office.
Not so certain is the path for a free press. With or without Trump’s promised assault on defamation law, traditional news organizations continue to shed staff as they face rising costs amid falling revenue. New media attract eyeballs, but for the most part, remained linked to the content produced by the aforementioned mainstream press.
Opinion and talk often substitute for news and information. During the past 20 years, the once-feared “watchdog on government” has lost more and more “teeth” — and in the case of cable television news channels, sometimes seems only to be barking for attention.
Many more than Trump challenged the veracity and motives of major news-media outlets. The data-dump website WikiLeaks feeds the national daily news diet with leaked private emails from the Clinton campaign amid rumors that it’s at least assisted — if not directed — by a hostile Russian government.
Whether it’s all of that, or Trump’s promise to diminish press protections, or Clinton’s expressed intent to reconstitute restrictions on contributions as a form of political speech, the future of free expression seems likely to remain “political” long after this year’s ballots are counted.