Crisp and accurate expression

 

The Sunday Times, before Murdoch bought it, was a world leader in investigative journalism, innovation and integrity, although the paper still commits good journalism.

Sir Harold Evans the former editor of  The Sunday Times, has a benign proprietor ( Roy Thompson) who exempted Evans’ domain from his robust views on profit.

Evans always employed good writers and actually edited the opening paragraphs of the biggest stories and often has his own personal stamp on them, to make it sharper, leaner, better and stronger.

Evans’s indispensable insight give a  definite guide to writing well, with the right words, the oxygen to our ideas, as more speed and more information but less clarity has prevented the compulsion to be precise has vanished from the culture in the digital era.

Evans (88) has been out of English journalism for over 3 decades, spent his time in the US to do his latest book which has a distinctly American feel to it.

The book is full of enthusiasm for words with sound advice for anyone who wants to make themselves clearer, in writing novels, articles, memos to the regional sales director and even applies to unwritten words.

According to Evans, the past 500 years, prose sentences have steadily shortened to mimic speech and have halved from an average of 60 to29 even by verbose, to our ears.

He is deadly against pointless passive, the lonely modifier and abstract examples rather than concrete by explaining what he means by a lonely modifier.

He gives example from a sentence in the New York Times where presidential “advisers” and the crucial fact that they were taken by” surprise” were separated by 36 words of the same sentence all irrelevant.

He hates Monologaphobia, a phrase from Theodore Bernstein of the New York Times whose description of monologaphobe as someone “who would rather walk naked in front of the Saks Fifth Avenue than be caught using the same word twice in three lines.

Evans understands that there is no single correct approach to writing as it completely relies on what one is trying to convey.

 Do I make Myself Clear? Why Writing Well Matters by Harold Evan, Little Brown £20/$27 416 pages