By MERVIN BLOCK
August 2003

A new broadcast stylebook has debuted on the Internet. And you can download it, free.

The book is The BBC News Styleguide. The British Broadcasting Corporation uses it to guide writers, editors, producers and newsreaders–as it calls anchors. (Full disclosure: last year, I spoke at the BBC.)

The book has an English accent, but it provides pointers that can also benefit newspeople on this side of the ocean. After all, or before all, the Brits helped create our language.

Why do we need stylebooks? To learn more–about writing, language and broadcast style. And a stroll through this guide can be a learning experience. For careful writers, it’s not enough to let your consciousness be your guide.

“A great deal of news output is written in haste, with one eye on the script and the other on the clock,” the Beeb’s book says. “Writing under pressure is what our kind of journalism is all about, but it is no reason for ungrammatical, inelegant or sloppy use of English…Well written English is easier to understand than poorly written English.”

A few tips in the book:

• “The key to good writing is simple thoughts simply expressed.”
• “Broadcasters should always identify the source of an assertion before making it…You would not say to a friend: ‘I am a dissolute, disreputable failure, a moral vacuum with no discernible redeeming features. That’s what my wife said last night.’ You would naturally put the attribution first: ‘My wife says I’m a dissolute….’ That’s the way we speak, and it’s the way we should write news stories.”
• “You do not often hear people in conversation use words like bid, probe, pledge, axe, plea and all the other short words in the headline writer’s sack. Good radio and television writers avoid them.”
• Among the clichés and journalese to steer clear of: “Fighting for his/her life–the subject is probably unconscious in a hospital bed and making no attempt to do anything…Garner–as in She garnered three awards. Only ever used by hacks… Today–broadcasters should hardly ever need to say this [Don’t our U.S. listeners also know that newscasts deliver today’s news, unless otherwise specified?]…Vowed–when was the last time you vowed anything?”
• “The Dutch live in the Netherlands. Holland properly applies only to two coastal provinces. The Dutch like us to remember that.” [“If people from Poland are called Poles,” the comedian George Carlin asks, “Why aren’t people from Holland called Holes?”]
• “Speak properly. Some common words are regularly mispronounced [on the BBC].” Examples: “Febbery (February),” “nucular (nuclear) and “Laura Norder (law and order).”
• “Do not try to add impact to your stories by using superlatives you cannot justify, so make sure of your facts before you use words such as first, last, most, largest, unique, unprecedented….”
• “Crescendo is a gradual increase culminating in a climax, so it is wrong to say something rose to a crescendo. The word you want is climax.”
• “Go missing is inelegant and unpopular with many people, but its use is widespread. There are no easy synonyms….”
• “Historic is a popular word with journalists. It is nice to think that the events we are describing will resonate down the decades, but who are we to judge? Use with great care, and never confuse with historical, which means belonging to history.”
• “Good writers will try to avoid vogue words because they know everyone else is using them…infrastructure, scenario, leading edge, meaningful, interface, fashionista….”

As for using that or which, the book says, “That defines, which informs. This is not a cast iron rule, but it can help: This is the house that Jack built, but I think the one next door, which Jack also built, is more attractive.”

“Want more of this kind of stuff?” the book asks unstuffily. Just in case, at the end, the BBC lists books that can also teach us a thing or two.

Keep in mind that there are some differences between English English and American English. Two brief examples: a bulletin over there is a news program. not a this-just-in item. And they put periods outside quotation marks. (In 1944, Bob Hope told GI’s in London, dentifrice is “BBC for toothpaste.” But that was then.)

My bookshelf holds three current U.S. broadcast stylebooks, and I recommend them to everyone in broadcast journalism. The books are: Associated Press Broadcast News Handbook by Brad Kalbfeld (476 pages), A Broadcast News Manual of Style by Ron MacDonald (224 pp.) and Broadcast News Writing Stylebook by Robert A. Papper (294 pp.). They all have different strengths, and they carry far more content than The BBC News Styleguide (86 pp.). But in ChevyChasespeak, that book is the BBC’s; the others are not.

Whichever book(s) you consult (or ignore), please write in broadcast style–and in English. As William Safire says, paraphrasing Lord Admiral Nelson at Trafalgar, “English expects all of us to do our duty.”

The BBC News Styleguide is not sold (or given away) in bookstores, but it’s as near as your keyboard. No, I didn’t forget to tell you the guide’s URL. I’m just following one of Strunk and White’s principles of composition in their Elements of Style:

“The proper place in the sentence for the word or group of words that the author desires to make most prominent is usually the end…[and that principle] applies equally to the words of a sentence, to the sentences of a paragraph, and to the paragraphs of a composition.”

That way, I got you to tag along with me so I could snare you in the web: the URL for the BBC’s free online training courses for radio and television–including sound, lighting, shooting and writing–is: http://www.bbctraining.co.uk/onlineCourses.asp.

And for the free stylebook from BBC Training & Development, the URL is: http://www.bbctraining.co.uk/pdfs/newsStyleGuide.pdf

By MERVIN BLOCK
August 2003

A new broadcast stylebook has debuted on the Internet. And you can download it, free.

The book is The BBC News Styleguide. The British Broadcasting Corporation uses it to guide writers, editors, producers and newsreaders–as it calls anchors. (Full disclosure: last year, I spoke at the BBC.)

The book has an English accent, but it provides pointers that can also benefit newspeople on this side of the ocean. After all, or before all, the Brits helped create our language.

Why do we need stylebooks? To learn more–about writing, language and broadcast style. And a stroll through this guide can be a learning experience. For careful writers, it’s not enough to let your consciousness be your guide.

“A great deal of news output is written in haste, with one eye on the script and the other on the clock,” the Beeb’s book says. “Writing under pressure is what our kind of journalism is all about, but it is no reason for ungrammatical, inelegant or sloppy use of English…Well written English is easier to understand than poorly written English.”

A few tips in the book:

• “The key to good writing is simple thoughts simply expressed.”
• “Broadcasters should always identify the source of an assertion before making it…You would not say to a friend: ‘I am a dissolute, disreputable failure, a moral vacuum with no discernible redeeming features. That’s what my wife said last night.’ You would naturally put the attribution first: ‘My wife says I’m a dissolute….’ That’s the way we speak, and it’s the way we should write news stories.”
• “You do not often hear people in conversation use words like bid, probe, pledge, axe, plea and all the other short words in the headline writer’s sack. Good radio and television writers avoid them.”
• Among the clichés and journalese to steer clear of: “Fighting for his/her life–the subject is probably unconscious in a hospital bed and making no attempt to do anything…Garner–as in She garnered three awards. Only ever used by hacks… Today–broadcasters should hardly ever need to say this [Don’t our U.S. listeners also know that newscasts deliver today’s news, unless otherwise specified?]…Vowed–when was the last time you vowed anything?”
• “The Dutch live in the Netherlands. Holland properly applies only to two coastal provinces. The Dutch like us to remember that.” [“If people from Poland are called Poles,” the comedian George Carlin asks, “Why aren’t people from Holland called Holes?”]
• “Speak properly. Some common words are regularly mispronounced [on the BBC].” Examples: “Febbery (February),” “nucular (nuclear) and “Laura Norder (law and order).”
• “Do not try to add impact to your stories by using superlatives you cannot justify, so make sure of your facts before you use words such as first, last, most, largest, unique, unprecedented….”
• “Crescendo is a gradual increase culminating in a climax, so it is wrong to say something rose to a crescendo. The word you want is climax.”
• “Go missing is inelegant and unpopular with many people, but its use is widespread. There are no easy synonyms….”
• “Historic is a popular word with journalists. It is nice to think that the events we are describing will resonate down the decades, but who are we to judge? Use with great care, and never confuse with historical, which means belonging to history.”
• “Good writers will try to avoid vogue words because they know everyone else is using them…infrastructure, scenario, leading edge, meaningful, interface, fashionista….”

As for using that or which, the book says, “That defines, which informs. This is not a cast iron rule, but it can help: This is the house that Jack built, but I think the one next door, which Jack also built, is more attractive.”

“Want more of this kind of stuff?” the book asks unstuffily. Just in case, at the end, the BBC lists books that can also teach us a thing or two.

Keep in mind that there are some differences between English English and American English. Two brief examples: a bulletin over there is a news program. not a this-just-in item. And they put periods outside quotation marks. (In 1944, Bob Hope told GI’s in London, dentifrice is “BBC for toothpaste.” But that was then.)

My bookshelf holds three current U.S. broadcast stylebooks, and I recommend them to everyone in broadcast journalism. The books are: Associated Press Broadcast News Handbook by Brad Kalbfeld (476 pages), A Broadcast News Manual of Style by Ron MacDonald (224 pp.) and Broadcast News Writing Stylebook by Robert A. Papper (294 pp.). They all have different strengths, and they carry far more content than The BBC News Styleguide (86 pp.). But in ChevyChasespeak, that book is the BBC’s; the others are not.

Whichever book(s) you consult (or ignore), please write in broadcast style–and in English. As William Safire says, paraphrasing Lord Admiral Nelson at Trafalgar, “English expects all of us to do our duty.”

The BBC News Styleguide is not sold (or given away) in bookstores, but it’s as near as your keyboard. No, I didn’t forget to tell you the guide’s URL. I’m just following one of Strunk and White’s principles of composition in their Elements of Style:

“The proper place in the sentence for the word or group of words that the author desires to make most prominent is usually the end…[and that principle] applies equally to the words of a sentence, to the sentences of a paragraph, and to the paragraphs of a composition.”

That way, I got you to tag along with me so I could snare you in the web: the URL for the BBC’s free online training courses for radio and television–including sound, lighting, shooting and writing–is: http://www.bbctraining.co.uk/onlineCourses.asp.

And for the free stylebook from BBC Training & Development, the URL is: http://www.bbctraining.co.uk/pdfs/newsStyleGuide.pdf