MY MEDIA ENGLISH WATCH

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Wrong word choices, overwriting mar a TV network’s online news

On the suggestion of a news executive of one of the Philippine TV networks, My Media English Watch now also covers the online news websites of the two majors, GMA TV News and ABS-CBN News. So, starting this week’s edition of the Forum, I’ll also do critiques of their English grammar and usage alongside that of the four major Metro Manila broadsheets, namely the Philippine Daily Inquirer, Philippine Star, Manila Bulletin, and The Manila Times.

For those not very familiar with how my media English watch operates, I would like to emphasize that I’m only on the lookout for instructive grammar and usage errors in news and feature reporting. I would like to make it clear that the faulty English I find in the media outlets covered by my watch is generally not reflective of the overall quality of their English or of their journalism. We can take it as a given that most of the daily written output of these media outlets is written in grammatically and semantically good English. Indeed, their grammar and usage errors are just flies in the ointment, so to speak, and I critique them simply as an opportunity for helping particular media outlets avoid them the next time around, and, of course, also as a learning opportunity for Forum members and others interested in continuously improving their English.

So let’s see now what I found during my initial sorties into the online websites of the two major Philippine TV networks:

(1)  GMA News: Improper word choices

In the lead sentence above, the use of the verb “promised” in the phrase “a cabinet official has promised a ‘bright future’” and of the verb “embodies” in the phrase “as the industry embodies a promising outlook” are improper wrong word choices.

No responsible and right-thinking government official will categorically promise a bright future for graduates of any course no matter how promising its outlook, for there simply are too many imponderables about the future and about the prospects of individual graduates. I therefore suspect that the NEDA director-general, who is not a politician as far as I can gather, had simply made a wrong word choice here or had been misquoted by the TV reporter. Instead of “promised,” the more circumspect verb “expects” or the verb phrase “looks forward to” is called for in that sentence.     

In the case of “embodies,” which means “gives body to” or “personifies,” it’s an overly strong and overemphatic word choice that makes the phrase “as the industry embodies a promising outlook” not only an awkward but grammatically faulty overstatement. The word “has” would have done much better in that phrase: “as the industry has a promising outlook.”

See how sensible that lead sentence would have read and sounded with those replacement word choices:

“Despite the problems that plague the maritime industry, a Cabinet official expects a ‘bright future’ for the graduates of Philippine maritime studies as the industry has a promising outlook.”

Here’s an even smoother, more grammatically impeccable version with the second problematic phrase totally reworded:

“Despite the problems that plague the maritime industry, a Cabinet official expects a ‘bright future’ for the graduates of Philippine maritime studies because of the industry’s promising outlook.”

(2) GMA News: Overwriting and wordiness

The two-paragraph lead above reeks with overwriting, wordiness, and fancy words and phrasing (“would be well-advised to be aware of,” “traipsing,” “true pulse,” “surfeit of urban life,” “a whole slew of wonderful things”). The news anchor who read that news feature on TV must have badly stumbled enunciating all those highfalutin words and phraseology.

In particular, “would be well-advised to be aware of” could have been said more concisely and precisely as “you’ll find”; “traipse,” a needless word, could have been eliminated altogether; and the phrase “surfeit of urban life” would have done better as plain “urban life” without “surfeit.” Worse yet, “a whole slew of wonderful things” is a grammatically anomalous phrase that misuses the adjective “whole” to modify “slew,” which is a noun that means “a large number.” It’s obviously grammatically improper to say “a whole large number of wonderful things,” so it’s clear that “whole” shouldn’t be used to modify “slew.” Indeed, “slew” can stand very well all by itself in that phrase: “a slew of wonderful things.”

So here’s how that two-paragraph passage might have looked shorn of its needless grammatical baggage:

(58 words against the original 90 words)

(3) ABS-CBN News:  Use of wrong coordinating conjunction

Because of its use of the wrong coordinating conjunction “as,” the first sentence of the lead passage above erroneously conveys the misleading sense that the tragedy that struck on Holy Thursday was separate and distinct from the drownings in Oriental Mindoro. The fact is that the tragedy and the drownings are one and the same incident, a situation that would have been correctly and clearly conveyed had the subordinating conjunction “when” been used instead. Indeed, structurally, the sentence shouldn’t be a compound sentence but a complex one, with “tragedy struck on Holy Thursday” as the main clause and “two people drowned and another one went missing in a river in Oriental Mindoro” as the subordinate or dependent clause linked to the main clause by the subordinating conjunction “when.”

The second sentence of the lead passage is likewise grammatically faulty, for it yields the wrong sense that it was the bodies rather than the drowned victims who were identified. This is the result of the wrong positioning of the names of the drowned victims in that sentence, making those names modify the subject “bodies” instead of “victims.”

Here’s a rewrite of that lead passage that corrects all of the grammatical problems described above:

SHORT TAKES IN MY MEDIA ENGLISH WATCH (PRINT MEDIA):

(1) Manila Bulletin: Faulty sentence construction

The lead sentence above conveys a wrong sense of causality because it uses the wrong subordinating conjunction “after” to link the main clause “the agriculture sector in the province of Agusan del Norte is expected to get a big boost” and the subordinate clause “new Korean investors are set to start develop a large yellow corn plantation in the area.” The proper subordinating to use in that sentence is “when,” which will clearly indicate that the action in the main clause is the result of the action in the subordinate clause. Also, since the phrase “are set to start” only serves to ruin the logic of the statement, it has to be dropped from the sentence altogether.

Here’s that lead sentence as reconstructed to yield the correct logic:

“BUTUAN CITY, Philippines – The agriculture sector in the province of Agusan del Norte is expected to get a big boost when new Korean investors start their projected development of a large yellow corn plantation in the area.”

(2) Philippine Star: Subject-verb disagreement error

In the lead sentence above, the correct operative subject of the verb phrase “one of the Filipino practices that has ‘gone astray’” is the plural “Filipino practices,” not the singular extended noun phrase “the tradition of some people to be crucified as a demonstration of their sacrifice during Holy Week.” The correct form of that verb phrase is therefore the plural “have ‘gone astray’,” not “has ‘gone astray’.”

So here’s that lead sentence as corrected:

To avoid subject-disagreement errors, it’s  very important to check the logic of a sentence rather than just rely on the proximity of the operative verb to several possible subjects or doers of the action.

(3) Philippine Star: Faulty phrasing that conveys the wrong logic

In the lead sentence above, the phrase “still thrive in this town for 91 years now” conveys the wrong logic to the sense intended by the statement. The phrasing that will yield the correct and logical sense is “still thrive in this town even after 91 years,” as follows:

“HAGONOY, Bulacan, Philippines – Despite budget constraints and the proliferation of highly budgeted movies, community theaters depicting the passion of Jesus Christ known as the senaculo still thrive in this town even after 91 years.” 

(4) Philippine Star: Seriously convoluted and confusing feature writing

As you can see, the two lead paragraphs above—they are from a press release that evidently saw print without being edited—border on incoherence because of the seriously convoluted and confusing feature writing. This time, as a grammar and editing exercise, I am inviting Forum members to critique this problematic passage and to come up with an improved version. Please send your revision by e-mail to j8carillo@yahoo.com. I’ll post the best three revisions in the next edition of the Forum.

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