Mea Culpa: Clause and effect

Questions of language and style in last week’s Independent, by Susanna Richards

When our own headlines are in accidental doublespeak, we’re in trouble (Russian State Library)

It is clear that Starmerism has so far been defined by the eradication of Corbynism, which has had damaging consequences at grassroots level,” one of our contributors wrote in an opinion piece last week.

For the grammar nerds among you, the second part of that sentence is an example of a non-restrictive relative clause – a thing unbeloved of editors everywhere for its propensity to cause utter confusion. If the political alignment of the author hadn’t been obvious from the rest of the article, it would have been hard to know what they meant: was it the eradication of Corbynism that had caused the damage, or the Corbynism itself?

I’m sure our more politically attuned readers will have taken a view on that, one way or the other.

Yellow flag: For those of us unacquainted with its joys, the world of motor racing (along with the task of writing about it) is fraught with mysteries, but we should at least be able to get the terminology correct. Roger Thetford wrote in to say that a couple of the words we had used in our coverage of the Melbourne Grand Prix had failed to qualify.

The first was “sand trap”, in reference to the run-off area beside the track. Roger thought it ought to have been “gravel trap”, and that does seem to be the predominant term, though some of the relevant websites reckon both versions are OK. The second was “curbs”, which is the US spelling of “kerbs”, and as such ought to have been changed to the British spelling in line with our style. Sorry about that... we’ve fixed it now.

Internal audit: The dreadful situation in Ukraine deserves our fullest attention, not least in the matter of making sure our reporting of it is as clear and accurate as possible. We managed to make the cardinal error of confusing the verbs “inter” and “intern” in a report last week concerning the burial of Russian soldiers, though the mistake was swiftly corrected.

We meant to say that they had been interred; to intern someone means to imprison them. Given the seriousness of current events, it really is important that we don’t get these details wrong.

Mixed messages: We ran a short headline last week on a piece about the Kremlin’s other war – the one that seeks to win the support of Russia’s citizens with the clever use of propaganda. “Most Russians believe Putin lies, says head of shut-down TV station,” we wrote, which fitted the space available and at first glance looked fine, before we realised it was thoroughly (and delightfully) ambiguous.

We changed it to say “Putin’s lies” instead, which, leaving aside the question of what constitutes a lie, at least left no doubt as to our meaning.

A fair cop: “Police officers have been accused of ignoring the law to ‘bully, harass and intimidate’ sex workers,” we wrote at the start of another article last week. Again, this could have been read in two different ways.

It is important that we are as clear as possible in our writing, especially in our top line. It isn’t that we think our readers can’t figure out what a sentence like that means, given the context, but people don’t always read the whole article, even if they look beyond the headline. Besides, our job is to make sure that understanding our copy doesn’t feel like hard work. It was changed to “... ignoring the law in order to ...”, which removed any ambiguity.

Stress busting: We managed to use the word “pressures” four times in the space of five short paragraphs in an article about the NHS last week. This was uncalled for, and to top it off we also used “amid” where we really didn’t need to. “Amid Covid pressures, hospitals are also facing extreme emergency pressures, with 20 A&Es having to divert ambulances,” we wrote in one particularly dreary sentence.

It’s one of those words that seems to get dragged in by default as a dull (if dependable) alternative to all the other ones a writer might use to make a line interesting, accurate, or worthy of inclusion. Needless to say, a ruthless edit was performed.

Noble intentions: There was a near miss last week in an article about an actor defending a new drama “against accusations that it exploits Savile’s countess victims”. I don’t normally allocate space in this column to typographical errors, as they can happen to the best of us and cannot be altogether avoided, but I did think this one merited inclusion simply for being a proper word, albeit completely the wrong one.

Must try harder.