Mea Culpa: take a break and don’t forget to undo the negative

John Rentoul on questions of style and usage in last week’s Independent

Working from home? Take breaks, which are not bad for you (Getty Images)

In an interesting article about the importance of taking breaks while working from home, we cited research into office life: “Studies have found that more than a third of British workers don’t leave their desk during their lunch hour, something that has proven benefits when it comes to productivity and your mental wellbeing.” This is a common flaw, and I do it so often myself I have given it a name: “Forgetting to Undo the Negative.”  

It is hard for the writer to spot, because their train of thought makes sense to them, and they fail to see how a reader might follow it differently. Thanks to Steven Fogel, who pointed out that we appeared to be saying that not taking a break has proven benefits.  

The sentence needed to say something like: “A third of British workers don’t leave their desk during their lunch hour, although a break has proven benefits…”  

Over-invested: We said that Corona lager sales “skyrocketed” in 2020, a word which used to be a particular bugbear of mine, not just because it is an extravagant metaphor for a 40 per cent increase in sales, but because it is tautological: the point about rockets is that they go up in the sky. However, I am coming to terms with my inner curmudgeon, and have decided that a bit of tautology and exaggeration for emphasis is fine.  

Then I reached the second paragraph of our report to find that “Britons have invested an additional £2.5bn on wine, spirits and meats”. “Invested on”? Keep the skyrocketing by all means, but let us go back to “spent”, shall we?

Hung and drawn: Our minimal hyphen policy is occasionally controversial (some readers think that should be our “minimal-hyphen policy”), but there is one place where we really don’t need them, and that is fractions. We said that “Tier 4 covered three-quarters of England”, when our style is “three quarters of England”.  

Wildlife on the pitch: In a sports report (it may have been association football), we wrote: “Danny Ings’s nonchalant clip into the far corner two minutes after the opening whistle was enough to decide an encounter that Liverpool lionised the ball in, but failed to make life uncomfortable for Fraser Forster.” Thanks to Roger Thetford for mentioning it to me, but because he was able to deduce the intended meaning of “lionised” is “had the lion’s share of”, I had to rule his objection out of order. 

The sentence construction, however, is awkward. Given that few reporters these days would go for the full old-fashioned “an encounter in which Liverpool lionised the ball”, we needed to start again. Perhaps “the encounter”, full stop, followed by: “Liverpool lionised the ball, but failed…”