Mangling Meaning, # 25

This is another example of yesterday’s mangle, this time preceded by some confusing syntax:

Link: Coventry Telegraph, ‘Coventry pensioner conned out of cash in bogus lottery scam’

Ambiguity results from the omission of the conjunction that, which would indicate both the start of the subordinate clause and its relation to the main clause, and its replacement with inaccurate and inadequate punctuation. These errors mean that the ground is not prepared for the rest of the sentence, and indeed make it seem at first that the Trading Standards spokeswoman is replying to the correspondence. The omission of the conjunction also means that it is unclear whether the section beginning ‘victims’ is correctly shown as reported speech (Morgan said [that] victims), or actually direct speech that lacks quotation marks (Morgan said: ‘Victims’), which is underlined by the use of the same term, said, to introduce both direct and indirect speech. The whole is nonsensically laid out in paragraphs made of short, single sentences, producing a disjointed style that does not aid comprehension.

syntax [missing that = ambiguity]; paragraphing; sucker’s list

Sentences are not paragraphs

When did the arbiters of house style at BBC News decided to conflate the sentence and the paragraph? This comment appears in a guide called ‘How to write a press release’, targeted at schools:

Link: BBC | BBC News School Report | ‘How to write a press release’

Contrary to the assumption here, however, a staccato writing technique such as this frequently makes it more difficult to comprehend content, as well as requiring the reader to discern connections that the writer should be making plain.

An example can be found in the opening section of the report that supplied yesterday’s mangle:

Link: BBC News, ‘“Unclear” Surrey Magna Carta plans under spotlight’

Various issues arise. The report shows that the ‘one or two facts’ method does not indicate the relationship between different facts or sets of facts: for example, what relation does the ‘Egham’ paragraph bear to the information that immediately precedes and follows it? The information that is shown is not clear or unambiguous: for instance, does ‘Egham was to be branded “the gateway to Magna Carta country” at Runnymede’ mean there was to be a branding launch ceremony at Egham? At Runnymede? The failure to explicitly connect one insular set of facts to another makes it seem as if all of the council’s £1m, and the total £8.3m, was to be spent on the branding exercise: is this true (a ‘fact’) or not?

The problem is that these ‘single sentence paragraphs’ are not being used ‘quite often’, and in a specific manner and for a specific purpose, as ‘How to write a press release’ implies, but all the time and without thought. In BBC News writing, sentence has become synonymous with paragraph. In the report on the Magna Carta commemoration, every sentence is treated as a paragraph, as if each were self-contained and logically complete. There’s no denying that breaking down content in this way is sometimes useful (if facing the audience with very long sentences to read onscreen, for instance); but the technnique, if overused, disrupts both the flow of the syntax and the text’s logic. It is, of course, possible for a sentence to be completely self-contained: the opening paragraph in the BBC report above is a perfectly valid single-sentence paragraph. However, treating all sentences as paragraphs undermines the text’s coherence by blurring the causal relationships and the logic of the progressions.

Paragraphs are intended to draw together material that is closely associated, making the connections in the content immediately and visually apparent, in order to aid the reader’s understanding. The correct composition of paragraphs is a subject that occurs in many of the BBC’s ‘Bitesize’ education pages. Perhaps BBC News should require its journalists and editors to take its quiz on paragraphs, and revise the topic where necessary:

Succinct and corrrect, even if the syntax of the question and answer are not always harmonized…

Apostrophe catastrophe, # 13

Telegraph 0―Guardian 1:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Societies ability’

Link: The Guardian, ‘societies’ ability’

  

As well as the accurate use of the possessive apostrophe, The Guardian offers better capitalization and paragraphing: the initial capital of the Telegraph’s ‘Societies’ is superfluous, and it’s nonsensical to split this short quotation into separate paragraphs. This is becoming a habit in online journalism; the BBC is another frequent offender.

A paragraph may in some instances be a single sentence; but a sentence is not a paragraph.