If your English composition instructor forced you to read The Elements of Style once or, better, twice, and you adopted its creed wholeheartedly, then you are well on your way to becoming a successful broadcast writer. Unfortunately some English composition students always go awry. These students mistakenly attribute their passing grade to a newly discovered ability to express abstract ideas with esoteric language. Worse yet, they employ this style every opportunity they get.
For that reason this lesson ends with a real-life example that contrasts the writing of a well-intentioned student with a skilled broadcast writer. Both spoke at an august ceremony replete with academic robes and banners-the inauguration of a new president for the University of North Carolina system. Public television carried their words across the state. The broadcast journalist, Charles Kuralt of CBS News, attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as an undergraduate. He welcomed the new president on behalf of the university alumni. The student representative, a senior at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, was the elected head of a student government forum that represented the university’s 16 campuses. He welcomed the new president on behalf of all students. He spoke his 545 words first:
It has been said that education is the instrument by which the past is preserved, the present made productive, and the future given promise. As such, the role of the university has been to 192 serve as a vital conduit through which the advancement of knowledge can be passed. This conduit has bound itself inextricably with the ability of North Carolina’s young people to be more than passive recipients of what is. Rather it has allowed them to be shapers of what ought to be. For many years the University of North Carolina has been an essential, irreplaceable crucible of learning and evaluative thought. In this crucible the friction among ideas has been the heat that generates the transformation called education. This process has manifested itself in the thousands of students that have been endowed themselves with more than a means to make a living. They’ve been provided with a means to make a life.
In order to foster a society capable of enduring the critical transitions ahead of us, we must supply the current and forthcoming constituents of that society with the tools necessary to construct a future worthy of the proud heritage of our past. Accordingly, we must commit ourselves to the augmentation of pure learning with values that will ensure a culture based on ethics and integrity. An education is void of true meaning if it leaves a person incapable of exercising compassion, justice, morality, courage, conviction, and other factors necessary to the improvement of the human condition.
With these thoughts weighing heavily on our minds, we place our trust in a leader we believe will provide the direction and distinction necessary to move the University towards these goals. In good faith, President Spangler, we support your assumption of responsibility, fully cognizant of your ability to shepherd the educational mission of our system with the same enthusiasm and vigor exemplified in your continued dedication to the advancement of education.
When one considers the dilemmas facing our state and our nation, it is an easy task to see why your leadership as chief post-secondary educator will be indispensable. The strongest forces in history have not been societies, but highly motivated persons that have comprised the society and their ideas of what it is worth living for.
Today, President Spangler, you will undoubtedly have many questions to answer and difficult choices to make. Some of these questions may be: How can this University retain and cultivate its sound commitment to ensuring the access to knowledge that makes freedom truly possible? How can we improve the content and character of our academic programs to afford the maximum educational utility to students? What can we do to keep educational opportunity open to all with the attitude and aptitude to learn?
These questions and many others are already there, and your leadership will be instrumental in providing us with answers. Surely the roads to the future are not paved in asphalt. They are paved in the education of our people in order that they may live more productive and enriching lives as citizens of this state.
Here is a student who desperately needs The Elements of Style. We learn that the university is a conduit, a crucible, and, oddly, a more important road to the future than blacktop highways. For those unfamiliar with North Carolina politics, that last was for the governor, who sat nearby on the podium. Traditionally, road building and education programs are at odds in the state budget, but this ungainly metaphor made no impact on its intended audience.
Kuralt limited his remarks to 315 words: When I was a student at Chapel Hill, I was contemptuous of the alumni. The fat, bald ones who cluttered the campus on reunion weekends, acting as if the University belonged to them And now fat and bald, I understand at last that it did belong to them. That it does. And I speak for them this morning, the men and women, living and dead, who passed part of their lives at these schools and carried a part of these schools away with them into the state and into the world. They all return in spirit this morning, President Spangler, to bid you welcome and to put into your hands the care of their university. The one they loved so. And love so.
It will be no secret to you that alumni can be a trial from time to time and their proprietary affection for Alma Mater a burden of your office. If you wish to know the size of the burden, I may as well tell you now. The number of living alumni of the 16 schools for which you now assume responsibility is 529,592.
Most of them will come to you in person to offer advice. Therefore, I shall not presume to do so. For I knew earlier than most about your character and intelligence when you were Dicky and we were 13, I voted for you for president of the student body of Alexander Graham Junior High School. And having had no reason in the intervening years to waver in my confidence or affection, I now vote for you again on behalf of all 529,592 of us, to hold to this greater presidency in the tradition of Frank Porter Graham and William C. Friday, which is a noble tradition. And in the name of a liberating and liberalizing education, which alone can advance our state and region, and save our precious world.
The audience interrupted with laughter and applause. Kuralt’s speech the shortest of the day, had the greatest impact. He focused on people’s actions, not abstractions. The most surprising story was the vignette from junior high school. Few persons in the audience knew that the two men had crossed paths previously. But, for a broadcast writer, the most impressive aspect of the speech was Kuralt’s assault on the rule that large numbers should be rounded off in broadcast copy. By enumerating each digit, Kuralt not only conjured up, but enlarged until it became comical, the image of 529,592 alumni bearing down on a green university president.
Yet all this was accomplished using easily pronounced words- two thirds were four letters or fewer-and sentences that gave the speaker time to breathe. Only six times did Kuralt use words longer than 10 letters. By contrast, the student speaker used 23. They are listed next in order of appearance.
- Contemptuous
- advancement
- proprietary
- inextricably
- responsibility
- irreplaceable
- intelligence
- transformation
- intervening
- transitions
- liberalizing
- forthcoming
- Constituents
- Augmentation
- Improvement
- Distinction
- Responsibility
- Educational
- Advancement
- post-secondary
- indispensable
- undoubtedly
- educational
- educational
- opportunity
- Instrumental
- Universities
Big words are not always the enemy. But the student’s long list of high-sounding terms brings to mind George Orwell’s critique of what he called inflated style: political prose where the author strings together ready-made phrases that generates only a dim blur in the minds of the audience. It is telling that the student alludes to the university’s “educational mission,” “educational utility,” and “educational opportunity,” while Kuralt pinpoints “intelligence.” In broadcast writing, you choose a word because it signals a precise meaning or image. You must, as Mark Twain once scoffed, “Choose the right word, not its second-cousin.”
