Tome & Plume: Fine Expressions Apt To Context Enrich Content

Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh): There is an old saw, “Don’t drive your reader to the dictionary.” The proverb is common in newspaper offices. Yet, few know this maxim lacks any legacy. Many editors, authors, and teachers have misconstrued this saying. The misinterpretation of this adage comes about the same way it happens to ‘five W’s and one H’ in writing an intro of a news story. Let’s first discuss the significance of ‘five W’s and one H.’

Nobel laureate Earnest Hemingway wrote the last page of ‘A Farewell to Arms’ sixteen times.  Ergo, it is the beginning that gives newspaper writers the trouble. If an effort to get the beginning right fails, the reader will stop there.

Former editor of The Sunday Times and The Times of London Herald Evans wrote: “What bothers journalists when they sit down to write their first paragraph (called an intro in Britain and a ‘lead’ in America) is that it seems to them they are being asked to sum up in one paragraph a drama akin to King Lear crossed with My Fair Lady.”

The purpose of an intro is to sum up a story in a few short sharp sentences conveying a maximum of impact. According to Evans, an intro as short as 17 words can be inviting. “The first time 53-year-old Sidney Anderson was seen drunk was the last time he was seen alive.”

“That intro would have been spoiled if an address or a date or a location or the coroner’s name had been added,” wrote Evans. Many newspaper offices lay down a rule maximum number of words for an intro – a little awkward though it may sound – it is necessary and helpful.

The reporter’s obsession with secondary details manifests itself. The intro begins with a participle, “advised,” which is a weak form of the verb. So, it made the intro clumsy. Only at the end of the long sentence, does the reader know what the intro is all about. It could have been made crispy, straight, and yet readable. Dividing the paragraph into two sentences was not hard to achieve.

An intro becomes more significant if the sentence begins with the main clause. Thus, the proverb – don’t drive your reader to the dictionary – is for this kind of writing. It is, however, construed as against using new words. But if an expression is apt to a context, it just enriches the content.

Evans said, “This is a rule for a news story, but not for an intro.” It should focus on effects. It should talk of one news idea. Two ideas have made the intro inelegant. The subordinate clause has dominated the main clause, because the sentence has begun with an adverb “under.” 

There was a failure of decision behind the intro that contained two news ideas. There is another example of clumsy intro. “After hearing shooting at the Berlin Wall yesterday an American military policeman raced to the scene and found East German guards trying to drag the refugees back.

The American soldier went to a second-storey window overlooking the Wall, threw a tear-gas grenade, to make the East Germans release the refugee, then climbed on top of the Wall and amid a hail of bullets between East and West helped to pull the refugee to the West.” The reading is dramatic. But the intro is hardly good enough.

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