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Anoraks? That's not our style



The rules that govern how The Observer wields its hyphens, dashes and accents are being rewritten

Readers' editor Stephen Pritchard
Sunday October 12, 2003
The Observer


The following apology was printed in the Observer's For the record column, Sunday October 19 2003

Gabriel García Márquez appeared as Gabríel Garciá Marquez in the article below. Apologies.




Prepare for wailing and gnashing of teeth: The Observer style guide is about to be revised. As the evenings draw in and lights begin to twinkle from a thousand Clerkenwell windows, small huddles of journalists will gather in stuffy meeting rooms to decide, for example, whether hip hop should be hyphenated, or the Foreign Secretary become the foreign secretary.



Before you accuse us of pulling on oversize anoraks, these things are important to every newspaper. The best style guides aim to iron out inconsistencies and to promote clear, unambiguous writing. The proposed changes, says our style book editor in an introduction to his first draft, are primarily aimed at making the paper easier for the reader (fewer capital letters, fewer hyphens, for instance) and therefore easier for writers and editors.

He also suggests we include more examples of common grammatical errors, something close to the heart of the many readers who write to me when we are less than felicitous with the English language. In fact, you could say this latest revision (the last was in 1998) has been driven in part by readers' contributions to our 'For The Record' column over the past two-and-a-half years.

Style guides are arranged alphabetically for ease of reference, so we plunge into controversy straight away with a proposal that we drop accents on foreign words that have become part of the English vocabulary - cafe, cliche, detente, denouement, debacle, etc. There are exceptions, of course: résumé and exposé would be confused with existing English words without their accents. (The need to keep accents on proper names had the style guide editor's imagination offering the following fantasy story line as an example: 'Arsène Wenger was kidnapped while on holiday in Bogotá with Gabriel García Márquez.')

All newspapers have their own style quirks. For years, the Daily Telegraph insisted on calling Livorno in Italy 'Leghorn', and The Observer hung on to 'Peking' for a long time after others had switched to 'Beijing'. Place names will form a central part of the new guide, with the paper's specialists being consulted, and, no doubt, arguments will rage about suggested changes.

Another Observer peculiarity has been to 'cap up' Government when referring to Her Majesty's and to 'knock down' all others. This seems unjustly jingoistic and our style book editor proposes all governments, of whatever nation, take the lower case g. 'Down with them, all the time,' he writes, with revolutionary zeal, while proposing the same treatment for what we currently call the Left and the Right.

You can learn a great deal from the best style books. Here's a new entry in the first draft: 'Pieter Bruegel (about 1525-69), usually known as Pieter Bruegel the Elder, spelt his name Brueghel until 1559, and his sons retained the 'h' in the spelling of their names. So, elder without an 'h', sons with.'

Here's some advice on the use of the dash: 'Some writers - who shall be nameless - believe that the dash - if used often enough - adds panache to a sentence - or every sentence. This clearly is not true.'

Clearer guidance on proper terms is included this time. Use, 'disabled people', for instance, not 'the disabled'; never 'wheelchair bound', always 'wheelchair user'. The blind and the deaf should be referred to as blind people and deaf people, and so on.

'Fulsome' which is rarely used correctly (it means cloying, excessive, disgusting by excess) gets a mention, as do nonsense phrases such as 'head up' and 'meet with' and the proper use of the term 'ironically': 'Avoid when what you mean is strangely, coincidentally or amusingly. Irony is a deliberate incongruity between what is said and what is meant.'

We tend to describe actresses as actors, yet a note in the first draft points out that actor/actress is a useful distinction. 'Compare author/authoress. While men and women can write about anything, female Hamlets or male Eliza Doolittles are rare. And Meryl Streep has yet to pick up a best actor award.' I can see that one causing some heated debate.

There is some sage advice for those tempted to write a 'dropped' feature-like introduction to their story. (He was a mild-manner doctor by day. But by night he was a monster. The man they called Dr Jekyll... etc). 'If every writer on the paper used it but once a month, we would still have 10 such intros every week. And some weeks we do. Use sparingly.'

The style council begins its (not their) deliberations in a fortnight. Your comments are welcome. We can't (use contractions sparingly) guarantee to include them all, but they will be given an airing in those stuffy meeting rooms as autumn descends on chilly Clerkenwell.




Contacting the Readers' Editor
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