Clarity of expression is essential
Headlines or articles should never leave readers puzzled
I don’t believe that old words are always superior to new words. I don’t believe that formal language is always better than casual speech. But one thing I do believe is that clarity is a virtue. In journalism, politics, business — and in daily life as well — to speak and write clearly is to speak and write well. When you puzzle your listeners or readers, you’re at risk of losing them.
One domain of language that demands clarity is the writing of headlines. Back in March, I noticed a headline on the home page of the BBC News website: “Sheep photo police minister confesses.” It was difficult to imagine what that could mean.
The story turned out to be about the Minister for Police in the Australian state of New South Wales. While stopped at some roadworks, he took a photo of a nearby car with a sheep in it, then sent the picture out on Twitter. But using a mobile phone at the wheel is illegal in the minister’s state, and he was fined as a result. What makes the headline so hard to understand is the run of four consecutive nouns. Headline writers need to compress information into a brief space, but not at the expense of clarity.
By contrast, the journal Nature showed a deft touch last year in the title it gave to an article about the 3.2-million-year-old fossil popularly known as Lucy. A team of researchers, examining the remains of this ancient human ancestor,
What might seem like a blatant error in other provinces is not always a big mistake here.
argued that Lucy had died from a “vertical deceleration event.” Say what? The article’s headline relied on a much simpler phrase: “fall out of tall tree.”
In a couple of recent Watchwords columns I looked at the growth of local and informal expressions, with terms like “2 Chow” and “doggo” being widely used among young people in Montreal. “Vertical deceleration event” represents the polar opposite: a technical expression that makes sense to scientists but needs translating into the vernacular. Journalists and editors have a key role to play here. We can take unfamiliar wording, whether of the informal or the pedantic variety, and explain it to people who are not in the know.
A challenge that reporters sometimes face is to figure out if a new or unfamiliar word makes enough sense outside a particular group or sub-group for it to appear in a story without explanation. After a civilian jetliner was shot down over Ukrainian airspace, for example, the missile’s origin and the killers’ identity remained unknown, and the New York Times quoted a Pentagon official as saying: “The analysts are still trying to get detailed granularity on that.” Should the newspaper have explained “granularity” (a scientific term meaning the level of detail or amount of information in a set of data) or was the meaning clear from the context? Judgments calls like this are made at high speed in every major newsroom, and it’s astonishing how often reporters and editors get it right.
The need for clarity is particularly great in a bilingual city like Montreal, where hundreds of thousands of people spend part of every day in their second or third language. What might seem like a blatant error in other provinces is not always a big mistake here. Before the recent floods reached their height, for instance, a reporter for CBC Montreal said: “A lot of rivers are under surveillance this morning.” You may regard that sentence as a deeply regrettable example of franglais, but at least the meaning is clear.
Some examples of franglais lead to confusion: think of “She assisted at a manifestation,” instead of “She attended a protest.” That kind of sentence cries out for revision. But when no clarity is lost, as with rivers being under surveillance, I’m not too upset.