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.

Writing the summary lead is as simple as 1-2-3.

And, it can map out your article from A to B to C.

Ernie Boone, formerly a Michigan State University journalism instructor, outlined his three-step process for writing the summary lead:

1. Hook the reader
2. Inform the reader
3. Organize the story

In greater detail, then: Hooking the reader means to seize on the most interesting detail of the story and announce it first. There are many ways to hook readers. Tell them about something that will happen to them. Wow them with remarkable facts. Appeal to their sympathies. Choose your hook from the traditional “who-what-where-when-why-how” lineup that you’re writing about.

Generally, the most important fact of the story will not be where or when something happened, Boone said.

Once you’ve grabbed your readers, inform them by bringing in the other key facts, typically, the remaining W’s. But don’t stop there, said Boone. Go beyond telling readers what happened. Try to tell them the effect or result of what happened. Relate it to them. This will lift your article up out of the past, and spill it forward into the future and into readers’ lives.

Third, use the structure you laid down in No. 2 to organize the rest of your story. Explain things in the order that you used to introduce them. Some will take just a sentence; some will take a few paragraphs, but you have already mapped out the general direction for your story.

Boone offered a few more things to keep in mind, and some things to avoid:

DO write in the active voice (Tracy spilled the beans), rather than the passive voice (The beans were spilled by Tracy.)

DO keep your lead brief. It’s OK to have one-sentence paragraphs — especially here. Keep the full lead — which might run to a few sentences — to 35 words or less.

DO restrict yourself to the essentials. The lead may need the name, but can the title wait till later? Do we have to know the exact time in the lead, or can that wait?

DO tell readers where the information is coming from when it reports opinion, speculation or guesswork.

DO NOT start you lead with the word “There”. (There was a blah-blah-blah …)

DO NOT start with the when of a story. Bore-ing.

DO NOT make your lead a single three- or four-sentence paragraph.

DO NOT load the lead with opinion or judgment (In a stupid move, …)

“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.

Tear a page out of your Journalism 101 textbook and it says not to use jargon. Police, courts and government are well known sources of the stuff, so even the newest reporters knew which words to watch for.

But the landscape is changing, and journalists need to recalibrate their jargon detectors.

News diets once laden with articles about government and criminal justice are loading up on heaping servings of business, medicine and technology. Although we’re getting technical terms from new sources, jargon is still jargon: specialized language that excludes outsiders. That is, readers, viewers and listeners.

While the new jargon is coming from different places, it still has the same purpose.

On its best days, jargon clarifies issues for people who share some expertise. Greenmail, debentures and twisted cable are simply specialized terms or shorthand. Some, which enjoy only brief lives, are buzzwords that can unite people or quickly communicate a complex idea.

To outsiders, though, they can be forbidding.

Here is a passage from the Amgen Pharmaceutical Web site, intended to help insiders understand one another:

“In addition to naturally occurring neurotrophic factors, Amgen scientists are also investigating the therapeutic potential of neuroimmunophilin ligands which were acquired from Guilford Pharmaceuticals. Neuroimmunophilin ligands are a novel class of orally active, small molecule neurotrophic agents that represent a new approach in the treatment of neurodegenerative disorders. These small molecules are being investigated as a potential therapy for Parkinson’s disease.”

While pharmacists say, “oh!” the rest of us say, “huh?”

Journalists certainly would never put that on the air or in print, yet USA Today, published this quote: “In private, the bottom line is that everybody is keen to generate the killer combos of applications (of bandwidth) to fill those pipes. Just how much of a glut develops depends on how aggressively carriers light fiber.”

Greenmail? A poison pill defense? A white knight? Golden handcuffs? Opportunity costs? De facto? Quid pro quo? Business and technical communication is peppered with terms and expressions whose meanings are not obvious to the uninitiated.

At its most insidious, jargon is used or even invented to deliberately cloud. Some people deliberately use jargon to fuzz things up.

The rationale that gave us downsizing (and then rightsizing), reductions in force and collateral damage now has its own jargon name.

It’s called a fuzzword.

Marketing News defined a fuzzword as one “having an aura of a new, more exciting reality, but one that has no basis in the real world.”

One paradox of jargon is that, even though it may be impenetrable, it sometimes sounds colorful.

Red ink, greenmail, blue-chip stocks and brownouts paint otherwise colorless events and subjects in colors that journalists might greedily dip their brushes into, but clarity has to come before color.

Consider the headline, “Blue chips hit new high as Fed rate session looms.” That makes sense to an executive, but how about a non-investor? You know what a cash cow is, and a can of worms, but what about a bear hug, turkey trot, elephant hunt and “that dog won’t hunt”?

That’s business jargon.

Whether intended to clarify or cloud, jargon obscures news for outsiders and chases them away from the news media.

We all know that, but with jargon coming at us faster than ever and from new sources, it’s no simple thing to deflect it on its way into our stories.

JARGON BUSTERS

Although some of the jargon is new, the strategies for rooting it out are the same: First, be attuned to words that, though they may mean something to insiders — and that sometimes includes us — may confuse people outside the specialty. If it confuses a reporter, editor or producer, it will likely confuse folks in the audience. Use simple substitutions. While reporting, ask sources to break down, translate or explain technical terms. If you’re editing, go back to the reporter or check other stories for clearer language. When there’s no way around using a technical term, explain it or hyperlink to a definition.

Here’s an example of old jargon explained:

Mechanic’s liens are intended to protect contractors and subcontractors from not being paid by giving them the right to file a lien against the land or the building to satisfy unpaid charges.

Here’s an example of new jargon explained:

DWDM, or dense wave division multiplexing, boosts the capacity of communications networks for Web, telephone and video traffic. DWDM splits a light beam into different colors, or wavelengths, each of which

can transport a separate load of Internet traffic.

(Thanks to Paul D. Samuel, associate editor at the Daily Record, a specialized business and legal daily newspaper based in Baltimore, Md., for both of those.)

Does anybody really edit?

Do editors edit, or are they just spitting in the wind?

Writing coach Jack Hart says that the problem with most writing in most newspapers is that editors don’t edit. They polish. They massage. They tweak. They spend most of their careers getting very good at dealing with the last stage in the process.

Hart is a managing editor at the Oregonian, and spoke to newsroom training editors at a conference at the Freedom Forum’s Pacific Coast Center.

“Although there has been a lot of fussing and hollering over the last several years about new newsroom structures, most newsrooms in most places are still pretty much organized according to the 19th-Century factory model, and that’s an assembly line.

It is very linear, and it is organized so that everybody works with the immediately preceding person in the process, only at the very last stage of the process.”

Reporters typically work entirely on their own through important early stages in the writing process such as choosing sources, focusing the story and determining its structure.

By the time an editor gets involved, Hart said, the reporter has made most of the key decisions — alone. The editor comes in just to polish things up. It is simply too late to deal with the important questions where the reporter might have liked to have had someone to work with. The stuff that most editors spend most of their time on in most newsrooms is the last step in the process. “Consequently, editors have sort of co-opted themselves from the various steps in the process at which all the important decisions are made,” Hart said.

Writing is a process, Hart said, and drafting is one of the last stages and one of the few stages at which editors and reporters generally get together in most newsrooms. “It is perhaps the least consequential stage in the process, insofar as it exercises any large impact on a piece of writing.” Bruce De Silva, enterprise editor for the Associated Press, attended the conference and said, “writers feel powerless because they do all this work and they turn in the story and then lose control. Editors feel very powerful because they get to take the story and do anything they want. Those feelings aren’t very good, because they lead to a lot of animosity.”

The surprising thing, said De Silva, is that “the way people feel is the opposite of the way things really are,” because all the editor can really do is tinker with the language.

The assembly-line approach, then, becomes “a demoralizing process in which editors and rewrite folks receive stories that are 90 degrees off what they are expecting, find out so late that the only thing they can do is rewrite in a hurry, and the reporters are taught that whatever they send in will be screwed up anyway, so why try?”

Hart said that when he asks what conversations have been held in the course of writing a story, the most common response he gets is, “None.”

Hart’s advice to writers is to pay less attention to the results of good writing, as shown in innumerable writing books, and to concentrate on the causes of good writing — the thought processes that led to those results.

When he works with newspaper staffs, Hart asks writers and editors how they spend their time, and he asks them what the problems are. He says he finds that 95 percent of editors’ time is not spent on the parts of the process where problems arise. Stories with structural flaws, the lack of a nut graph or buried leads or that miss the point go off the tracks long before editors get involved. When they do get involved, there is precious little they can do.

“The critical contact that has to do with writing is when that draft is turned in to the line editor,” Hart said. “But the vast majority of the writing is a done deal by then and nothing — NOTHING — that the editor can do at that stage of the game can make any substantial difference in the core of the story, the underlying tone of the writing, the stuff that really makes a difference in terms of where the story started and where it’s headed.

“What this really boils down to is changing the way editors work so that they spend more time talking to reporters at each stage of the writing process.”

As one example of how that time might be spent, Hart cited a technique outlined by Bill Blundell, author of “The Art and Craft of Feature Writing.”

Blundell asks writers to pursue chains of cause and effect. By asking about the implications of the newest information, they can jump ahead of the pack.

Hart said this is one of dozens of things that editors and reporters can do at a story’s conceptualization stage to help it reach its potential.

Hart said, “The kind of writing you get in American newspapers is a direct and predictable consequence of the way this process operates.”