Neither clichés nor jargon, journalese is the peculiar language that news writers have evolved for talking to readers.

Unchecked, it can read like this:

“Negotiators yesterday, in an eleventh-hour decision following marathon talks, hammered out agreement on a key wage provision they earlier had rejected.”

My! Well! We had better stay tuned for a headline on the inking of this historic pact.

“When I finally slept, I dreamed in headlines and bad newspeak: Pre-dawn fires … shark-infested waters … steamy tropical jungles … the solid South … mean streets and densely wooded areas populated by ever-present lone gunmen, fiery Cuban, deranged Vietnam veteran, Panamanian strongman, fugitive financier, bearded dictator, slain civil rights leader, grieving widow, struggling quarterback, cocaine kingpin, drug lord, troubled youth and embattled mayor, totally destroyed by Miami-based, bullet-riddled, high-speed chases, uncertain futures and deepening political crises sparked by massive blasts, brutal murders — badly decomposed — benign neglect and blunt trauma. I woke up, nursing a dull headache …”

– Edna Buchanan’s “Miami, It’s Murder”

Journalese is not jargon because it is neither specialized nor technical. It is not cliché because it’s too awful to be repeated by anyone.

Journalese can sound urgent, authoritative and, well, journalistic. But it doesn’t do any of that. Part of journalese is in the words; part is in the construction.

Words and phrases like eleventh-hour, marathon, hammered and key are relatively easy to spot. They show up as readily as their cousins from the planet jargon. All writers or editors need do is load up their mental dictionaries with words that are likely trouble-makers, and then keep eyes and ears open for them. When one shows up, challenge it. Does it belong? Does it tell?

A rewrite man at the old Oakland Tribune compiled these words on the newsroom groan board: despite, spurred, prompted, sparked, spawned, apparently, concerned, area, firm, focus, facility, closure, urged, massive, creating, affordable, potentially, possible, allowed, staffing, upscale, initially, underscored, launched. Mary Ann Hogan, a Chips Quinn writing coach, passed the list along and suggested cramming as many of those words into one sentence as possible: “Despite the closure of the facility as initially urged by the massive, upscale firm …”

For some reason (perhaps to protect themselves from assignments), journalists have developed a whole body of journalese for writing about the weather.

People hunker down, especially if they’re in the storm’s path, for fear of being in destruction’s wake when hurricanes batter or punish coastal areas. Tornadoes invade the heartland, while thunderstorms merely blitz the suburbs, pelting them with golf-ball-sized hail.

Why is it that storms pack winds, but people can’t pack wind, yet people can pack heat, and weather never does?

It’s easy to see why rain dampens spirits, but when it gets cold, really cold, does the mercury truly plunge? Just try to find a thermometer with any mercury in it.

The other part of journalese is in the construction. It is the voice, not the words.

Print journalists smirk at broadcast journalists who turn on their TV or radio voices while on air, but print journalists have a stage voice, too.

An otherwise normal person who is a print journalist might say, “I bought that stuff at Costco on the way home from work last night.” The same person, writing for print, would write “While traveling home from work Monday, this reporter purchased some items at Costco.”

John McIntyre, chief of the copy desk at the Baltimore Sun, offers three kinds of contorted construction that create journalese. The first two have to do with handling time elements.

* Time element and verb: In English, the adverb of time typically comes at the start of the sentence or after the verb, not after the noun, as in “The governor Thursday ”

* Time element with nouns: Usually, a time reference before a noun is taken as a restrictive modifier: “I will catch the 6 p.m. train” (as opposed to the train at 7:30 p.m.)
Journalists, however, write about “The Nov. 22, 1963, assassination of John F. Kennedy.” Not even conspiracy theorists, McIntyre says, challenge the date of the assassination.
If time does not distinguish the event from other events, put it at the end of the sentence, he says.
* Adverbs with compound modifiers: Somewhere along the line, we got the idea that it is bad to let an adverb come between the auxiliary verb and the main verb, as it does in “we have always lived here.” Writing (or editing) that as “we always have lived here” contributes to journalese, but to neither grammar nor clarity. Seventy years ago, says McIntyre, H.W. Fowler speculated that this ill-founded rule rose as a corollary to the equally misguided prohibition against splitting infinitives.
* Theodore Bernstein, in “The Careful Writer,” wrote that the most proper and natural place for the adverb is safely tucked between the verb and its auxiliary.

So, how do we weed out the words and structures of journalese? The best test is to read the copy aloud to see how it sounds before sending it along. This might make you seem odd to the person sitting next to you. Still, that seems preferable to sounding odd to the thousands who will read your story.

“Avoid clichés like the plague.”

How many times have you heard that one?

And why don’t we?

Don’t believe newspapers are cliché-ridden?

Maybe you’re thinking of the trite and true, such as plagues, hotcakes and the other side of the fence or the tracks.

We may not drag those out very often, but how many times have you read that someone was “clueless,” or a “poster child for … ” or a “… meister.” How many of them were “over the top,” “on acid” or “unplugged”? Does “yada yada yada,” “fuggedaboutit,” “duh” and “Baby!” really make us sound fresh?

Newspapers haven’t kicked the cliché, we’ve simply found a new source for them.

I call them quickchés: expressions that burst upon the nation’s eyes or ears simultaneously, and that are already threadbare before journalists start using them to dress up their copy.

Awash in movies, television and music with nationwide release dates, the country is immediately inundated with catch-phrases that journalists will recycle again and again. They may be quick, but they last long.

Is it still original to say “make my day,” the way Clint Eastwood did in 1983? And when will we tire of “Store wars,” “Car wars” and “Bar wars”? The original movie came out in 1977.

John McIntyre, chief of the copy desks at the Baltimore Sun, asks how many years it will be before newspapers stop parroting “If you build it, they will come” from “Field of Dreams.” That one movie has given us two of the most over-used quickchés in journalism history. It was released in 1989.

René J. Cappon had a few things to say about cliches in “The Word: An Associated Press Guide to Good News Writing,” published in 1982, when we had survived Watergate, were in the throes of Billygate, and had not yet cleverly written Clintongate, Monicagate or (fill in controversy here)-gate.

Cappon wrote that there is room for disagreement about what constitutes cliché, and that it is not necessarily wrong to use one. These are his guidelines:

* Use them sparingly. One may help the story; several usually do not.
* Use them when they fit the story precisely.
* Don’t use them to inflate simple situations.
* Get them right. (Do not throw the baby out with the dishwater.)
* Don’t try to freshen them up by tinkering.
* If you must use one, don’t apologize for it by putting it in quotes or introducing it, “As the old cliché says.” Cappon says that inviting readers to hold their noses just calls attention to the odor.
* Make an old saw cut in new ways by rearranging it: “Bedfellows make strange politics.”

How refreshing it was when, having read for years and years about “The Right Stuff” (a 1983 movie about the U.S. space program), that when the Free Press panned “Mission to Mars,” copy editor Emiliana Sandoval had the good sense to headline it “The Wrong Stuff.”

BANISHED WORDS

Since 1975, Lake Superior State University in Michigan has been issuing annual lists of banished words. If something shows up on the list, chances are you might want to keep it out of the newspaper. Some banished words from the 2010 list. I nominated the first two, as did others.
* Shovel ready
* Transparent/transparency
* Czar
* Tweet
* App
* Texting
* Friend, used as a verb
* Toxic assets
* Bromance
* Chillaxin

A good place to find some classic clichés is THE CLICHÉ FINDER.

And, for fun, try to test a patch of writing by pasting it into this online tool that will scan it for cliches and give yo a report. You can use it on your work or the wriiting of someone you’re editing.