Quotes are important in journalism and reporting because they tell readers the information in question wasn’t made up by a reporter, but is someone’s account or opinion.
Not all quotes are equal. The best come directly from an interviewee’s speech and are faithfully reproduced. In electronic media these are obvious – you see or hear the person in question saying their own words.
With written media, quotes can be either direct or indirect.
Direct quotes
Direct quotes are written inside speech marks and are more or less exactly the interviewee’s words.
I say “more or less exactly” because many journalists, myself included, tidy up, taking out the hesitations, the ums and the ahs. This is perfectly OK. What isn’t acceptable is putting words in someone’s mouth – words they didn’t use.
It would be normal to correct the grammar up to a point.
We often edit – often the reader only sees part of an interview. It wouldn’t be practical to include every word.
Indirect quotes
Journalists use indirect quotes to simplify and summarise an interviewee’s words, they improve readability.
Most quotes you see in written media come from interviews. Some come from prepared statements.
Organisations use prepared statements to control their message rather than answering pesky questions from nosey journalists whose job is to extract the truth not parrot propaganda.
Robotic speech patterns
Prepared statements generally don’t read like human speech. For some reason people think robotic English makes them sound more sincere or knowledgeable. Often the reverse is true.
Journalists don’t always make it clear when they repeat a prepared statement. This isn’t dishonesty. It happens because constantly telling readers where information comes from all the time quickly gets boring. We come from a tradition where the column inches allocated to a story was limited. And we still work in a market where readers lose patience with too much detail.
On the other hand, journalists shouldn’t pull the wool over reader’s eyes.
I tell my readers when a quote is from a statement when I’m writing a news story or feature, but not if I’m writing a two paragraph snippet. Most of the time I also tell readers if a quote is from an emailed response – which may have been written by committee or a social media post.
There’s a fine line between full disclosure and boring readers. But if the story is controversial or important, it is best to take the risk and be candid.
Given that the moment you throw one out, a device turns up that can only use the now missing proprietary cable, how many cables should you hoard?
Your job as a writer is to get your message across clearly and quickly.
One way you can sabotage communication is by laying traps for readers. Traps that halt a reader’s natural flow as their eye scans over text.
Punctuation – as the name suggests – stops flow. This is why I leave out optional commas.
You can also slow down a reader’s flow when you use capital letters incorrectly. For the same reason you should never write a word entirely in capitals.
Companies that insist their names are spelled out in capitals only do this because they want to halt the reader’s flow and make them take notice. You do not have to indulge them. It’s another story if they are paying you to write marketing copy.
Likewise I don’t use the ‘&’ symbol – instead I always write ‘and’. The exception to this rule is when the ‘&’ forms part of a company’s name.
The same applies to ‘+’.
It is also better to write out percent in full than use %. Although some newspapers, including one where I work, insists on using the symbol.
Never resort to phone text-style language in anything written for a wider audience. It isn’t funny, clever or useful.
Over the summer I’ve been fixing the broken links on my other website. There are close to 2000 pages on the site and by the end of November there were around the same number of broken links.
Links break when sites go offline or move pages from one URL to another without a redirect. This is sometimes known as link rot. It has become far more common in recent years. Some weeks the service I use to flag broken links shows as many as dozen either vanish or move. The most I noticed in a single week was 28.
Fixing broken links is tedious and time consuming. Some I just let go and delete the link. OK, I let a lot of them go. If they are easy to repair, I’ll rewrite the link.
So far this summer I’ve repaired or trashed, mainly trashed, about 1400 broken links. The downside of doing this is that twice I have accidentally hit the wrong button and republished the page with the broken link.
My newsletter readers might be wondering what is going on.
Avoid jargon if you can. Sometimes you have no choice.
It makes your writing difficult to understand and puts readers off. Jargon confuses readers and in many cases jargon is ambiguous – always a sign of poor communication. It puts a barrier between you and your readers.
This is especially hard if you interview someone who talks in jargon and mangement cliches. You have a duty to report their words accurately, but you also have a duty not to bombard readers with gobbledegook.
Where you can, turn quotes into indirect speech and simply drop the jargon term. Use easily understood descriptive words and phrases instead.
When you can’t avoid a jargon term give your reader a short definition in plain English.
If possible add an example to illustrate the definition.
I had to write about management when the term ‘participative management’ came up as unavoidable jargon.
I explained this as:
Participative management, a way of running things where the workers take part in decision-making.
It would have been so much better if the interviewee said that in the first place.
Some people think worrying about spelling and grammar is anal and backward. They are wrong.
There are two reasons why spelling and grammar are important and will remain important for as long as people still read printed words:
First: Well-written, properly-spelt, grammatically-correct English is unambiguous.
Poorly written English is open to misinterpretation.
If being understood is important, then worry about spelling and grammar.
Second: Well-written text flows, it’s a pleasure to read. It sends readers a message about your professionalism and wisdom. It is credible. People want to read more of it.
Poorly written English jerks around, it causes readers to stumble. They may not realise why this sets off alarm bells in their heads, but it does. They won’t look for follow-up reading.
Too much poor English and they’ll question the message. This may not happen on a conscious level. It may not happen with all readers. It will happen enough for it to matter. So yes, spelling still matters.
A journalist is a grumbler, a censurer, a giver of advice, a regent of sovereigns, a tutor of nations. Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.
Use capital letters for proper nouns. Avoid them for common nouns.
Proper nouns are the names of things. So use capitals for the names of people, places, months, days of the week, companies and so on. Don’t use capitals for common nouns.
People run into difficulty with capitals because there’s a temptation to use them for important words. In business writing people often use capitals as a way of avoiding offending someone or something by implying he or it isn’t important.
Another difficulty is with titles. Newspapers typically use a capital letter when the title comes directly before a person’s name but not otherwise.
New Zealand Prime Minister John Key is correct, but it would be the prime minister’s desk.
In his book Newsman’s English British newspaper editor Harold Evans says;
“Avoid using them unnecessarily. The Parks Committee, but subsequently the committee. The South West Regional Hospital Board, but then the hospital board.”
One piece of advice I had early in my career as a journalist is: “If in doubt use lower case unless it looks wrong”.
Lastly, do not use capital letters for emphasis and avoid writing words in all capitals.
One thing I absolutely HATE about TradeMe is that I filled in fields saying that I don’t allow pickups and I’m not open to offers and yet all week long I’ve had annoying fools sending messages for both these things. And I can see these people are major online traders.
My motivation for using TradeMe to sell the old tech from my cupboard is about recycling not about making money (which I send to good causes). I’ve noticed if I price low, traders will buy and resell my items at many multiples of my price. I have mixed emotions about this.
“Affordable” is one of the weasel words used by marketing people. What they hope you’ll read is “this is cheap”, what they actually mean is “you can buy this if your children miss out on essentials”.
It’s not a profound or original thought, but I’m overwhelmed at how many excellent pie makers there are in New Zealand. It’s something we do really well.
Yes, Australia is good at this too, their best are up there, but here the general standard even in modest looking suburban bakeries is high, often gourmet.
In urban areas you are rarely more than 15 minutes from great pies. Where I live I can count at least six first class establishments within 20 minutes.
For health reasons I have to limit myself to no more than two in any week, but the temptation is strong. What a way to go.
I love to fix broken things. My daughter gave me her stick vacuum. Turns out the problem is the battery, found a replacement battery, but it costs more to buy the replacement and pay for shipping than the price of a new vacuum. This is why landfills are full.
Made it to December 16 without hearing a single Christmas song… but from here on in it gets harder. Apart from anything else I can’t avoid the supermarket much longer
How bad is it when a New Zealand company INSISTS on a mobile phone number before you can order online, but will only accept numbers in the international format but without the + part of +64. Having to guess the required format is a customer usability nightmare.
I don’t see any away winners this week, that’s statistically unlikely, but here goes:
Arsenal - Everton - Home
Liverpool - Fulham - Home
Newcastle United - Leicester City - Home
Wolverhampton - Ipswich Town - Draw
Nottingham Forest - Aston Villa - Draw
Brighton & Hove - Crystal Palace - Home
Manchester City - Manchester United - Home
Chelsea - Brentford - Home
Southhampton - Tottenham Hotspur - Draw
Bournemouth - West Ham - Home
Last week I scored seven out of nine, my best week yet. The postponed Liverpool - Everton game would probably have given me an 80 percent hit rate, but there’s still time yet.
As of this week I’m at 59 right out of 119 games, a fraction under 50 percent.
Here’s an unpopular option that won’t win me many friends.
Nine times out of ten if you are driving around New Zealand and you see a sign that says “museum”… just carry on driving, if you need a break, find a cafe. They are usually good, the museums are not.
And we have a live cross to our relaxation correspondent…
For years I have resisted Apple’s offer of a three month free subscription to Arcade… I just can’t be bothered.
The thing about New Zealand is that you are only ever one Lotto jackpot away from being financially set-up for life.
A confession: I was too much of a coward to watch the Black Caps test match. What little I saw made me want to hide behind the sofa like I did when I was six years old and the Daleks were on TV.
