Soothing Raedwald, or Some Still Care

From Angels' mail:

I thought you might like this for your blog which I assume has not such faults.
Off to Peter Jones for lunch ...
More Christmas trees making a late appearance to cheer things up.

Dear Colleagues
One of the most important features of a quality newspaper should be headlines that accurately reflect what is in the story under them. Our splash headline on Monday read: "Barclays chief says property prices will fall 30pc". The problem was that he said nothing of the sort. We use the future tense to communicate that something is going to happen: it hasn't happened yet. What Mr Varley said (according to our story) was that prices had already fallen by 15 per cent and "we've got another 10 to 15 per cent to fall between now and the end of next year". Our readers are miserable enough about the decline in their asset values without our misrepresenting it to them as about to be even worse than predicted.

Also, the present tense was used in describing what Mr Varley said. He was not speaking in real time to our readers any more than anyone we report in our pages does. This is a tabloid device, and is why the style book specifies the use of reported speech in news stories. Please adhere to this in news reports at all times. It is a fundamental of serious newspaper reporting.

There seems to be confusion about the hyphenation of ages. In nouns it is a 17 month-old or a 34 year-old. In adjectives it is the 17-month-old baby and the 34-year-old man. Could I also remind you that where we are representing profanities we don't need to give a hint of what the word is: leave that up to the reader to decide in keeping with his or her level of incipient coarseness. So the most offensive word in the English language is ----. We had it in a blog as c---t, making it an offensive five-letter word, presumably "count".

Could we also please bear in mind that the past participles "brought" and "bought" mean two different things (you wouldn't, after all, get much of a result with a bring and bring sale)? Also, a spendthrift is not parsimonious; he is profligate. If you don't know what a word means it is generally a good idea not to use it until you have found out. Also, the passive voice of the verb "to beat" is "beaten": the headline last Sunday that said why "board games can't be beat" was not even semi-literate.

Some of us are writing so carelessly that we miss words out. Please don't. One story about abandoned pets had horrors including "as many 131,400 dogs were" and "worried that people losing their dogs don't where to turn"; we could have a little Christmas competition to fill in the blanks, I suppose. As if to compensate for these omissions, the writer then included a word twice: "said Clarissa Baldwin, the charity's chief executive, said." Senses of humour about this sloppiness are starting to wear thin.

There have been some factual difficulties in recent days. Several readers in Lowestoft were outraged to be told they lived in Norfolk. We are getting increasingly bad at allocating towns and villages to their correct counties. The readers really mind. If you don't know, look it up. We also claimed that William Blake's most famous poems are "Jerusalem" and "Daffodils". The poem now vulgarly named "Daffodils" was called "I wandered lonely as a cloud" when Wordsworth wrote it, and his view ought to be taken seriously. Blake, who was a different man altogether, also wrote such trifles as "Songs of Experience" (including "The Tyger") and "Songs of Innocence", which perhaps we should have pretended we knew. Finally, St Andrews is not part of the Russell Group of universities.

The Madoff scandal has caused some readers to inform us that a Ponzi scheme and a pyramid selling scheme are not the same thing. The former relies on a "hub" to which investors are attracted by supposedly remunerative financial instruments; the latter relies on investors recruiting others underneath them. The need for the latter to grow exponentially is what makes it likely to fail more quickly than a Ponzi scheme. In this and other contexts the word "scam" is unutterably tabloid and, like most slang, should be avoided in a quality newspaper.

Some of our literals this week would be amusing were they not so undermining of our reputation for quality. Apparently, "the Pound is now broadly week against a basket of currencies". Something "belconged" to somebody, which was quite astonishing. Best of all, the man who "through" shoes at President Bush has appeared in court.

Could we think a little more about punctuation, especially about the promiscuous use of dashes where commas do just as well? Could we also go easy on our use of acronyms, which tend to jar with the readers? If we talk about the Council of Mortgage Lenders they can just as easily thereafter be "the council" as "the CMA". Another tabloidism with which we are becoming too cosy is the verb "to fuel". It has a legitimate use in contexts concerned with energy. It is now hackneyed to use it in contexts such as "fuelling hatred", "drink-fuelled" and so on.

And I think we have had enough crackdowns for the time being.

Best wishes
Simon Heffer
Associate Editor
The Daily Telegraph