“Hey! You! Hey you!” Pretty rude way to get someone’s attention isn’t it? But that’s what we do when we start a story with “Attention!” or “Listen up!” Why not start the story with a question? Alternatively, you could start it with a fact. But now that I have you, let’s look at some common…
Journalsese: clichés, misnomers, and redundant phrases, all making their way too often into news scripts. So are misused words, which often won’t be caught by spell check. For those of you who are contributing to websites, here is a list of misused words recently gathered by a broadcast news editor: Defuse/Diffuse: To defuse something is…
When I started writing columns for RTDNA about bad broadcast news writing, I thought I would run out of examples, and quickly. I figured I would get two, maybe three columns out of the subject and be done with it. Almost, four years later, I haven’t run out. So far, I’ve written almost two dozen, with…
It’s “mourning’ in America” — or at least in Hollywood and in the sports world. If you watch, read or listen to the news, you’d think Hollywood and the sports world spend a lot of time mourning. And why would you think that? Because that’s what countless stories tell us Hollywood and the sports world are doing every time someone with any connection to…
I write often (excessively? obsessively?) about “journalese,” that strange language that broadcast – and sometimes print – journalists use. I see it as a virulent strain of American English. It is variously defined as “a superficial, cliché-ridden style of writing regarded as typical of” news writers and “the style of writing often held to be…