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GSGUIPress216-01 7/9/07 2:19 pm Page i Guardianstyle GSGUIPress216-01 7/9/07 2:19 pm Page ii GSGUIPress216-01 7/9/07 2:19 pm Page iii Guardianstyle David Marsh GSGUIPress216-01 7/9/07 2:19 pm Page iv First published in 2007 by Guardian Books, 119 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3ER www.guardian.co.uk Guardian Books is an imprint of Guardian News and Media Ltd Copyright © The Guardian 2007 The right of David Marsh to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 The Guardian is a trademark of the Guardian Media Group plc and Guardian News and Media Ltd 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-0-85265-086-8 Cover design: Two Associates Text design: www.carrstudio.co.uk Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books, Bodmin, Cornwall. GSGUIPress216-01 7/9/07 2:19 pm Page v Contents Acknowledgments vi Introduction 1 Glossary 4 A-Z 9 References 332 Appendix 1: The Guardian’s editorial code 334 Appendix 2: The editor’s guidelines on the identification of sources 350 Appendix 3: CP Scott’s 1921 essay on the centenary of the Manchester Guardian 353 Appendix 4: Excerpts from the 1928 Style Book of the Manchester Guardian 358 GSGUIPress216-01 7/9/07 2:19 pm Page vi Acknowledgments Very special thanks to Amelia Hodsdon, a superb subeditor and proofreader who has devoted a lot of time and attention to these pages. Thanks also to Richard Alcock, Andy Bodle, Helen Brooks, Kirsten Broomhall (who wrote the section on web style), Charlotte Dewar, Chris Hall, and Anna Bawden (for sorting out beeper and bleeper, and much more). This book would not be possible without the contributions of Guardian and Guardian Unlimited readers, with whom my colleagues and I share an invigorating daily dialogue that is reflected in many of the comments and suggestions included here. A special mention for my former colleague Nikki Marshall, co-author of the previous edition of this book. Her influence and inspiration continue to shine through these pages, even at a distance of 10,000 miles. Always remembering Patrick. David Marsh London, August 2007 The style guide is online at www.guardian.co.uk/styleguide The email address for your comments, which are very welcome, is [email protected] GSGUIPress216-01 7/9/07 2:19 pm Page 1 Introduction by Ian Mayes Well, is it bumf or bumph? You can see straightaway why Guardian journalists are required to read this stylebook. It is easily the best one that the paper has had to turn to, and easily the easiest to consult, freely available to all at the click of a mouse. This is the second edition and it is much larger than the first, something that is not attributable to any loss of concentration or falling away of standards: since the book appeared, three years ago, the Guardian has twice won the Plain English Campaign’s award for the best national newspaper, earning praise for the clarity of its language and, according to the citation, continuing to set the standard for others. No, the book has been extended, and in a few cases corrected, through the keen attentions not only of Guardian journalists but, much more than in the past, of readers from all over the world. They have leaped at the opportunity to participate. The daily corrections column is a standing invitation to do just that, and the inclusion of comments from readers throughout this new edition shows that the invitation is a genuine one and that the response is more than welcome. We are in this together. In fact, to say that journalists are “required’’ to read the stylebook may suggest that it could be considered a bit of a chore. Hardly. For a great many of us, probably including you reading this now, it is exciting and necessary stuff, moving enough to have had us reaching for a pen or hastening to our keyboard, perhaps in an initial lather. It shows that we all care not just about what is said but the way in which it is said. Of course, in 1 GSGUIPress216-01 7/9/07 2:19 pm Page 2 guardian print or online a newspaper is a newspaper, a machine whose tendency to err is a constant challenge to its operators (I don’t wish to make excuses). Perfection in the circumstances is not s possible. Most of us for most of the time want to be reasonable. t y People can sometimes become very unreasonable. Vasily l e Grossman, in Life and Fate, his account of life in the gulag (translated by Robert Chandler), records this meeting with a released prisoner: “He had been a proofreader on a newspaper and had spent seven years in the camps for missing a misprint in a leading article – the typesetter had got one letter wrong in Stalin’s name.’’ Well, of course, names are important. Today the proofreader in that sense no longer exists. Nowadays journalists have only themselves to blame for mistakes that escape all the checks. They are the checkers. The stylebook – you must concede at least this – is evidence of the huge effort the Guardian makes to contain the “shimmer of errors” that Vladimir Nabokov, or rather Humbert Humbert, suggested was a characteristic of newspapers. It can be a subtle business. Many entries emphasise distinctions between words often misused or confused: doner, kebab; donor, gives money (did someone resist the temptation to say “donor, kidney”?); hyperthermia, hot; hypothermia, cold; disinterested, free from bias or objective; uninterested, not taking an interest; hangar for aircraft, hanger for clothes. Grammar is defined, while saving us all the shame of pointing out that it occasionally appears as grammer. Some institutional idiocies are addressed. For example, the entry for “total’” wisely advises: “avoid starting court stories with variations on the formula ‘three men were jailed for a total of 19 years’, a statistic that contains no meaningful information ... ’’ Bertolt Brecht struggled to come close to sense with this kind of addition when he wrote of two bankers in Threepenny Novel: “Together they were more than 150 years old, and when one had to deal with them one had to deal with one and a half centuries’’ (translated by Desmond Vesey). In news stories it rarely adds up to add up. The “apostrofly’’ – the rogue insect that I can claim to have discovered – continues to alight in unlikely spots, as one of the 2 readers quoted here noticed: “I’ve seen some choice grocer’s GSGUIPress216-01 7/9/07 2:19 pm Page 3 apostrophes in the past, but I think ‘The Orkney’s’ in today’s guardian Guardian takes the biscuit.’’ A fairly long entry on the apostrophe attempts to put it in its (no apostrophe) place: we shall keep trying. style This edition includes an essay, a mini-workshop, on headline writing by the editor of the stylebook, David Marsh, who demonstrates what a tricky business it can be – “Book lack in Ongar”, about a crisis in the Essex library service, is still one of my favourites. He cautions subeditors about punning to tedium, where they nearly went with headlines in the 1980s. There is also a timely and informative essay on web style, by the chief news subeditor of Guardian Unlimited, Kirsten Broomhall. She explains how style can vary – how it is varied – to meet the developing requirements of what is already a multimedia website without departing from the values common to the whole Guardian. Both of these essays expose the inner thinkings and workings in a way that now comes more or less naturally to the Guardian. The more important entries, on terminology to do with race, disability, terrorism and terrorists, among other matters, are worthy of serious study and afford insights into, what shall I call it, the Guardian mind. Generally, it is a book for browsing, but perhaps too controversial a book for bedtime. A great many of the entries seek to resolve clamorous disputes, the noise of which has not in all cases completely died away. The question of the Guardian’s use of capitals and lower case, for example, is not the call to arms it once was, even if it still causes occasional skirmishes. The book, and this is a case in point, is all about persuasion and persistence, and sometimes compromise. It invites a response from you. Many of the entries are the result of responses from you. Thank you for that. By the way, it is bumf, but then we all knew that, didn’t we? Ian Mayes is the former readers’ editor and an associate editor of the Guardian. He is writing the history of the Guardian since the 1980s 3 GSGUIPress216-01 7/9/07 2:19 pm Page 4 Glossary adjectives modify nouns, as in “she had a quick drink” adverbs modify verbs, as in “she drank quickly” audio slideshow an automated online photo gallery with running commentary Berliner (also midi) newspaper format, narrower and shorter than a broadsheet, taller and wider than a tabloid; the Guardian switched to Berliner format on September 12 2005 blog a collection of online articles, and the action of publishing an article to the blog by a blogger blurb copy pointing to an article elsewhere in the newspaper or one of its other publications cap up start the word with a capital letter captions text describing a photograph or image City editor journalist in charge of the business section compositor a person who set type for printing (before newspaper pages were created on computer programs) copy the main body