Doing it in style
Writersworld newsletter, January 25, 2003

TWO types of writers upset editors: those who spend hours worrying whether Tokio is spelt with an i or a y and those who care nothing for consistency, grammar or punctuation. The latter group is capable of spelling Rumania three different ways in an article and as for cantaloup or card-index used as a verb they know not neither do they care.

Then there are people who worry that their lack of formal education will inhibit their attempts to earn a living from writing. We are often asked to provide a list of reference books to help these people and recently two new ones have appeared which we are happy to recommend.

The most recent is The Times Style and Usage Guide compiled by editorial executive Tim Austin and published by HarperCollins. Would you, for example, give capital letters to Royal Family, are you confident about assure and ensure or affect and effect? How many times do you think that John Betjeman's name has been mis-spelt and do you know that Biro is a trade name and should have a capital? Even cricket followers get Lord's wrong and Lytham St. Anne's should also have an apostrophe.

Yangtze takes a z not an s and Austin has persuaded The Times to spell connection with a ct in the middle and not with an x. You can appreciate that a style book is valuable for writers and is designed to eliminate grammatical errors, to keep up with fashion and to ensure consistency.

Shortly before Austin arrived in Fleet Street as a sub editor on The Daily Telegraph that paper used to ban perambulator, maidservant and blaze. It took only a few weeks to drag them into the 20th century but it still claimed that only Malays can run amok. The Times doesn't care who runs amok as long as it is not spelt amock or amuck. You would think that a simple word like verger has no traps.

Not so. At St Paul's and Winchester cathedrals he is a virger. I collect style books rather like some golfers collect putters - in the hope that the perfect one will arrive. Austin's effort is one of the best I've seen - almost (but not quite) on a par with The Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors which has been my companion for 20 years.

Getting down to basics I recently came across a slim volume entitled: Mend Your English. It is written by Ian-Bruton Simmonds, a South African, who told me that he put it together originally to help Zulus

The author is a campaigner for the preservation of the Queen's English. Like many, he would like to see the BBC doing more to uphold standards, but outside of Radios 3 and 4 I think he is facing a losing battle. His book wages war on those tired metaphors and similes.

Hold our heads high, best foot forward, spill the beans, put our foot down, ground to a halt. etc. I cannot help feeling that any Zulu who mastered this little volume would be better prepared than the announcers we have for children's TV programmes.

It's easy to be pedantic and to spend useless hours on semantics but every writer is a guardian of our language and if you cannot get on with Fowler or Gowers try Bruton-Simmonds. The sub title for the book is: What We Should Have Been Taught At Primary School. Now to something of a master class: The Times Writer's Guide.

This is more than a quick reference book. This is a delight for anybody interested in words. It was not written by a journalist or an academic but by 22 Writers' Forum Rupert Murdoch's late marketing manager for The Sun and The Sunday Times. Strewth, you might say, and that would be appropriate for he was also an Australian.

And a polymath, too. Poet, painter and author. We have mentioned this book before and make no excuses for mentioning it again. All three books should be required reading by advertising copywriters who draft display advertisements for jobs (display vacancies in their circumlocutory jargon) which appear in the broadsheets.

These examples of poor English are far worse than anything perpetrated by the BBC. I read one recently which changed tenses three times and mood twice in 200 words. All it needed to say was International oil company seeks qualified and experienced finance director. All the nonsense about he or she will have and he or she will be etc. merely cost the advertiser another �8,000 and marked the author down as illiterate.

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