Response to article on journalism courses - (The Hoot.Org, 01/07/2002)

OF POOR EDITING AND ENGLISH SKILLS

-- By Dasu Krishnamoorty

A few points Majula Lal made in her article (How Useful Are Journalism Courses) need reinforcement. First is the condescending attitude of the editors towards trained journalism graduates. The second is indifferent editing skills. A third is poor quality of writing. The condescension of those who think journalists are born not made is not new. Fifty years ago when I and Achuyt Bhogle (Harsh's father) stepped into the Times of India newsrooms as trainees from Osmania University, sneers from the born-variety greeted us. We undid all that through our work and some confidence-building effort from editor Frank Moraes.

Here, I cannot resist the temptation of adding something to Manjula's remark 'yet these recruiters which means mostly editors but often also managers are dismissive.' The recruiters are mostly managers and seldom editors. S.V. Swamy, general manager, interviewed me for a job in the Indian Express. V.A. Karnik, general manager, grilled me for a place in the Times of India. Again when a promotion was due for me at the Times, it was P.K. Roy, a man one rung above the general manager, who talked to me. At the Hindustan Times, it was Narendra Mohan and not editor N.C.Menon who interviewed me. By that time half a dozen main articles written by me had appeared in the Hindustan Times.

The point is if newspapers were to wait for the born-variety and shun trained graduates, there will be no newspapers to read. The aim of journalism courses is not to send out into the wide world the likes of Frank Moraes or C.R.Mandy. Their job is to train future sub-editors and reporters who will learn the nuts and bolts of the profession in newspaper offices. Additionally, graduates from these campuses bring with them an awareness of the theory of mass communication and press ethics. Ask the born-variety: what is news? They will fumble in reply, though every day and every hour news is what they are dealing with. The comedy (if it is one) is that the new graduates shed their innocence soon after they enter newspaper offices and behave in the same manner as their seniors do.

The second point is about poor editing skills. At the universities and Indian Institute of Mass Communication, true, senior journalists teach more than the basics of editing and reporting. But editing is not solely grammatical excellence or smart structuring of facts. It is a state of the mind. It calls for an ability to provide context to all information that is relayed to the reader. He/she must know where he/she stands in the process of information dissemination. Without this orientation, a journalist is a robot, programmed to turn out copy. The aim of editing is to impart meaning to a message.

Importance Of Grammar

The first thing in editing is language. As a vehicle of communication it calls for loyalty to its consensual nature. Taking liberties with language frustrates the process of communication. If you are using the word dog to mean cat you will have also to create the context which helps the reader to understand dog as cat.

Every year, I would begin my lectures at Indian Institute of Mass Communication and other universities where I taught with asking students 'when was the last time you opened a grammar book?' All of us assume that grammar is all about parts of speech and that it helps us write

correct English. Not true. We must know the difference between correct English and good English. A passive voice sentence is correct but inelegant. How many of us know these terms in English usage: ellipsis, antecedent, inflexion, redundancy, fragment etc. Yet it is necessary that we know these things because they are part of the language we are using to communicate.

One reason for bad English we read in our newspapers is the absence of editorial vigil. The editor, busy partying, appearing on the small screen and running errands for the publisher, has little time to call erring copy editors to his cabin and point out the mistakes. More than that the sub-editor/reporter hardly reads good fiction which helps him/her detect faultiness in a sentence. All good prose ultimately has to do with building a sentence. This is where syntax is important. He alone went to the college is different from he went to the college alone. These niceties seem unimportant but they change the meaning and subvert communication.

Poor editing skills are also the result of absence of interaction between the desk, the bureau and the editor. There is no mutual review of each other's work. In the six weeks of our training, Moraes used to call us every week to his cabin and discuss our work. We were after all trainees. I do not know what happened to the English courses the British Council ran for journalists for sometime. I know of no English newspaper or magazine in the country that is free from unpardonable English mistakes. Long time ago, Shekhar Gupta wrote in the Indian Express (28 January 1999): " It is difficult to defend the English media at the best of times. God knows we do commit crimes each day, on each page, including the rape of Queen's English." How true. Here are a few examples from the New Indian Express, Hyderabad (1999):

Subject-verb disagreement: New Delhi, Feb. 9. The prices of pulses is likely to go the onion way next year.
New Delhi, Sept. 16 (Heading on Page 11) "Release of two Indians hang fire." It ought to be hangs.

This one is in the main article on the edit page by Mashirul Hasan. Nov. 27: "For once he and his compatriot in Oxford Nirad Chaudhuri, was on the same wavelength."

Wrong Usage Hyderabad, Feb. 27 (page 4) In a suicidal note left behind, the couple stated that they were forced to take this rash step after both their parents declined to acknowledge their marriage. It should have been a suicide note.

Modifier Mistake New Delhi, Mar. 14 (Page 11) The Bill was approved after rejecting the statutory resolution moved by senior CPI member Gurdas Dasgupta. Where is the subject? Who approved the Bill and who rejected the resolution?

Jammu, Feb. 17 2000. Report by Pradeep Dutta begins like this: "Residing in pathetic conditions in single-room tenements at various camps in Jammu and other states, the survey conducted by various organizations shows that 48 per cent of the inmates are suffering from diabetes etc." The participle ought to modify not survey but the inmates.

Redundancy A PTI report from Islamabad dated Dec. 14 on page 11: "General Musharraf has promised to Iranian leadership to revert back to them on the project." Revert is enough to make sense. To after 'promised' is unnecessary.

These are not exceptions but the general rule and are not the monopoly of the Indian Express. All newspapers and magazines share this glory. We tend to attribute subject-verb agreement mistakes to poor proof reading. Not really. Editorial copy goes through several hands including the chief proof examiner and the assistant editor who handles edits and main articles. Additionally, computers come with spelling and grammar check software.

Journalists can avoid fifty per cent of grammar mistakes by following the four golden rules recommended by Fowler (I remember so)

	Prefer the simple to the complex
	Prefer the active to the passive
	Prefer the concrete to the abstract and
	Prefer the familiar to the unfamiliar. Passive voice is the bane of Indian prose.

When they open their newspaper, reporters first check whether they got a byline, and then whether their report is on the front page and finally whether it is double column or triple column. They never care to see what changes the desk had made in their copy.

Syllabuses

Today's journalism syllabuses do not include English as a subject. We learnt English as a special subject in our journalism course and our teacher was a man from Oxford. Binod U. Rao, a former editor of Indian Express and who regularly wrote middles for the Times of India taught us to write features. Economy (not Economics) should have a place in the syllabus because nearly everything related to public life and welfare can be linked to the state of economy. And hold your breath, our teacher was Dr. A.M. Khusro, later to become member of the Planning Commission and chairman of the 11th Finance Commission etc. Apart from who taught what, every journalist will have to have pride in the copy he/she turns out. It should be a matter of shame if the editor points out a mistake in your copy.

The habitat of all editorial delinquency is the newsroom itself more than the campuses. There should be a constant dialogue between newspapers and the campuses, for the former to clearly spell out the profile of the graduate they expect the campuses to turn out and for the latter to ascertain and meet media needs. More important than all these things is for the journalists to treat their career as another long course of advanced learning and not bide time salivating for subsidised housing, freebies and junkets.

Tailpiece Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri will broadcast a talk on NEFA which he toured last week tomorrow. This sentence appeared in the Vijayawada edition of the Indian Express and is a fine example of syntactical license.