Mea Culpa: something wicked this way comes

A review of style and use of English in last week’s Independent from Jo Turner

Tim Curry as Pennywise the clown in Stephen King’s ‘It’ (ABC)

This week we return to our campaign against lines starting “It comes…” and unfortunately, it’s not going well. Countless examples were published online in just a few hours, but the phrase, used as a sort of cue that “we’re about to talk about another part of the story now”, is lazy, repetitive, mostly unnecessary and no one actually says it. And that’s before images of a certain malevolent clown spring to mind.

Journalese creeps into our reporting, a US editor once said, “out of habit, sometimes from misguided training, and to sound urgent, authoritative and, well, journalistic. But it doesn’t do any of that.” So we’ll continue to bang the drum against reporters using this type of language because “that’s how it’s done”.

One example that would send a chill down the spine of our chief sub is: “It comes amid huge issues in supply chains in recent months, leaving some shop shelves empty… ” Regular readers of this column will know that “amid” is another word whose overuse we discourage (thankfully the sentence avoided an “ongoing”). What we should be doing is chipping away all those words that serve no purpose: I count four at the start of this sentence – we can assume the issues are huge, considering the disruption they’ve caused.