Subs’ nightmare of balancing headlines and folly of using redundant qualifiers
We received this one from a reader living in Dar es Salaam. He photographed this gem in Kisutu along Morogoro Road. He confirmed that what this particular outlet sells are SPARE Parts and not SPEAR Parts as the artist who handled the signboard is trying to show. Trust signwriters! PHOTO | ISAAC M
Media chiefs should organise more in-house training with a special focus on punctuation. This should go hand-in-hand with tutorials on some basics of grammar like: what is a sentence?
We’ll kick off today’s edition of this column by re-stating our perennial dismay towards Bongo scribblers’ lack of punctuation sense.
And in this case, we’re lamenting in regard to the print media as a whole. Even a mildly critical look at our newspapers will shock you, given the way some writers pen their articles with little concern—or knowledge— of what it means by a “full sentence”.
You’ll always come across pieces, including op-eds penned by “veterans,” who’ve been granted the privilege that classifies them as columnists, lumping three or more sentences into one! To them, a comma often used to mark the end of a sentence, after which another is started!
Our free advice here is: Media chiefs should organise more in-house training with a special focus on punctuation. This should go hand-in-hand with tutorials on some basics of grammar like: what is a sentence?
Having thus lectured (bah!), let’s proceed with dishing out what we picked up from the local English media over the week. Here we go…
Page 4 of Bongo’s senior-most broadsheet of Saturday, October 25,has a stand-alone photo whose caption reads, “Permanent Secretary in the ministry of Agriculture, Mr Gerald Mweli, explains about 250 sprinkler machines that will be distributed FOR ‘approximately’ 2,264 farmers across seven regions…”
Distributed ‘for’…? Nope! We say, distributed TO…Further on, we’ll beg to differ on the idea of qualifying the figure 2,264 with the adjective “approximately” since the number is precise.
It looks exact. Saying approximately 2, 260 would be okay. Or, you may say: …at least 2,260 farmers. Or: …nearly 2,300 farmers.
From the same title of Monday, October 27, there’s a Page 1 story with the headline, ‘TZ records 10pc decline in mobile money fraud’, in which the scribbler writes in his intro: “Tanzania has recorded a SIGNIFICANT 10 per cent decline in mobile money fraud attempts between June and September this year…”
Hello! Once you’ve provided a figure defining the rate of decline—that is, 10 per cent—you don’t need to tell your readers that the figure is significant. Let them determine that for themselves based on the facts that you provide in your story. You have no business ramming redundant qualifiers down the throats of your readers!
We note that the lead story headline reads, ‘Safe, orderly vote ASSURED’ while that of the earpiece goes thus, ‘Observers ASSURED of free, peaceful polls’. Now irrespective of what the details are—including the similarity of the messages—we aver that having two headlines on the same page with each bearing the verb “assured” is ill advised.
It depicts of intellectual laziness! Here’s our alternative headline for the earpiece: ‘Expect peaceful, free elections, observers told’. That kills one “assured”, ridding the front page of the echoing.
Page 4 of the broadsheet has a story with this headline, ‘Stakeholders/ push 20pc national/ budget education’ (our slash separates the decks as per the page designer’s dictates or the template).
No one, we’re certain, can tell what the headline writer is trying to say! For our part, we only manage to uncover what the jumbled up headline is all about after looking at the intro, which reads: “Education stakeholders have urged the government to allocate at least 20 per cent of the national budget to the education sector…”
There we are; so how about this alternative headline: ‘Call for upped/budget to/boost education’.
Note: Penning a headline to fit a multiple-decked template is sub-editors’ worst nightmare. May God’s mercies be upon sub-editors!
On Page 6 of Bongo’s huge and colourful broadsheet, there’s a headline for an opinion that reads, ‘Low oxygen chocking Lake Victoria, before adding fishing nets pollution’.
We find the headline hard to decipher, but on reading the text, we conclude that it could have been rewritten this way: ‘Low oxygen chocks Lake Victoria/fishing nets pollution makes matters worse’.
Ah, this treacherous language called English!
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