We live in a world of short attention spans. Even texts have been reduced to emojis. Get to the point. But you wouldn’t know that if you listen to broadcast news on radio and television. Remember those? The digital generation isn’t listening. Having grown up watching and working in boardcast journalism, I even get impatient with the sin of redundancy. Writing that’s lazy and overdone. Simple declarative sentences are being littered with unnecessary adjective and adverbs.
Confrontations between the police and demonstrators or rioters have become weekly and even daily stories. How many times have you heard them described as “violent clashes”? One definition of “clash” is to strike with a resounding or violent collision. It’s usually used to describe a sound. The word “violent” is redundant. I would also argue that no one uses the word in conversation. Can you hear yourself saying, “Hey, did you see the police clashing with the protestors?”
Sometimes these “violent clashes” lead to property damage when things can be “completely destroyed”. When something is destroyed, it’s complete. It’s beyond repair. It’s an over reactive description that tries to convince the listener or viewer that this was serious. Destroyed is serious.
Broadcasters find it hard to report things are “the same”. That sounds too ordinary. They usually insist on saying “exactly the same.” If something is “the same” it’s identical. “Those shirts are exactly the same”, should be “Those shirts are exactly alike.”
We all want to know the weather. Meteorologists can’t resist. They will tell us, “The temperature will be dropping down overnight”, or “The rain will be coming down an inch an hour.” Dropping only means one direction. When rain “comes down”, it’s raining.
If your listen to sports talk radio, you will find we are no longer just “fans”, we are part of the “fan base”. Do the radio hosts think this made up phrase makes them sound smart? “Fans” isn’t good enough. Is “fan base” just part of the fans? “Base” usually means the bottom support of something. Are there more “fans” on top of the “fan base”? And how do we get to be on a higher level of “fan”? So when Bryce Harper hits a game winning home run you would say, “The fan base went crazy when Harper hit that homer”?
Some may say this is nitpicking. Do people really care? The way we speak and the language we use tells people a lot about us. Broadcast writing has four basic rules, correctness, clarity, conciseness and color. They sound like good guidelines for how we should speak to each other. Words are the way we express ourselves, not only when speaking, but in writing stories, plays, poetry, music, and even business proposals. We express our thoughts in words. There is no more powerful communication. Broadcast journalists are paid to communicate important information as clearly as possible. Language is scared. It cannot be trivialized. The right word can express every human emotion from love to hate, happiness to sadness, understanding to resentment. We should use them wisely.
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