Mea Culpa: a triply negative story about the Tories

Confusing headlines and unnecessary, reader-repellent waffle in The Independent

The Conservatives failed in their bid to allow bee-killing pesticides in the European Parliament this week (Getty)

This column took a two-week break, because our use of English has been perfect and also there was an election on. Actually, last week I wrote a different kind of mea culpa about why I was wrong about Jeremy Corbyn, but now we are back to the more important task of commenting on distractions that get in the way of clear communication with the reader.

Unban the ban ban: We had a triple negative in a headline this week: “Tory attempt to prevent full ban on bee-killing pesticides thrown out.” So we have a ban, an attempt to ban the ban, and a counter-attempt, which was successful, to stop the attempt to ban the ban.

The only way this works is by using “Tory” at the start, because it is a value-loaded word that helps the reader make sense of the rest. We guess that the story must be, “Tories do bad thing”, so we are able to work out: bees = good; killing bees = bad; Tories want to kill bees, but have failed.

This is not ideal. Perhaps “Tories fail in bid to allow bee-killing pesticides” might have been easier to grasp, and might have allowed space to mention that all this was happening in the European Parliament.

Self-regard: George Orwell called them “verbal false limbs”, which has got to be one of the worst phrases ever used in an attempt to persuade others to write well. But you know what he meant when he gave examples: “give rise to”, “have the effect of”, “serve the purpose of”, and so on. One that struck me over the past three weeks is “with regards to”. We use it quite often, the search function tells me, although we sometimes write “with regard to”.

At one point we said that the Liberal Democrats have “not yet been forgiven for what was seen as their broken promise with regard to tuition fees”. This is waffle, stodge and reader-repellent filler. “Broken promise on tuition fees” would be fine.

Still with the Lib Dems, we had another comment article that said: “Norman Lamb, who lost the leadership race two years ago, is plagued by a record that is hesitant with regards to EU issues.” Leaving aside the disorganised mental image of an MP attacked by disease in the form of a vinyl LP, “hesitant about the EU” would have been simpler and clearer.

Forwards to the future: Another unnecessary phrase, and a common irritant in spoken English, is “going forward”. It appears in written English too, including in The Independent. We reported recently on a breakthrough in the treatment of ovarian cancer, and said, “the drug, which will be known as BTG945 going forward…” The use of the future tense, “will”, is enough to let the attentive reader know that the drug has not always had this name.

We also had a variant of “going forward” in a comment article which mentioned recent lawsuits against Uber alleging sexual harassment and rape by its drivers. “One of the great tests of the company will be how it copes with these allegations moving forward.” Again, just cut the last two words.