Opinion: Why debilitating expressions should be shunned

IEBC Chairman Wafula Chebukati and CEO Ezra Chiloba photo:courtesy

Every election year, the electoral commission (the name has changed over the years) is a beleaguered institution. Everybody - the opposition, the Political Parties Tribunal, civil society, the public, the international community, and the Government - all demand its attention.

They want a piece of it and whenever their egos are not massaged, they prod the electoral agency out of its lethargy through the courts.

In the run-up to the August 8, 2017 General Election, the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) was faced with a number of issues, including legal suits that a newspaper headline: ‘IEBC eases public worry on results’ failed to consider.

Let us begin by asking what ‘results’ means. Simply, this is what is to be achieved at the end of a process. For instance, examination results (after going through a segment of learning - primary school, secondary school, or college and being tested), laboratory results (after a medical test), or the result of a court’s deliberation on a case(s) before it. By itself, the word ‘results’ without being preceded by a specific area of testing is incomplete.

SCANNING HEADLINES

Thus, the aforestated headline is not explicit as it leaves the reader who simply scans the headlines trying to determine whether the results were from a court ruling or an election, as was expected prior to August 8. The use of the word ‘ease’, which is defined in the dictionary as ‘make something unpleasant or intense less severe or serious’, is not appropriate (but not entirely wrong) as an adverb to ‘worry’.

Substituting ‘ease’ with ‘relieve’, which is defined as ‘causing pain or distress less severe’ offers a better meaning. Note the difference between ‘make less severe’ and ‘cause to be less severe’. The operative word being ‘fear’, whatever action IEBC took at the time in addressing the concerns was intended to ‘cause’ the worry to be less severe.

I am reluctant to subscribe to expression ‘public worry’, for it is an all-inclusive, all-encompassing phrase. It means each and every one who falls under the classification of ‘the public’ is (was) worried. It is misleading because only one side of the competing interests, and even then, not all, had reason to worry.

As adage holds, one man’s meat is another man’s poison, hence worry is not necessarily collective. In a family set-up or a close-knit group, worry, depending on the cause, can be collective.

It is preferable that statements or assertions made in writing are made more precise, more definite than vague or simply to fill space to attain a specific word count in composition. The temptation to introduce irrelevancies is exacerbated when the writer finds he or she has exhausted all the major points in a topic but still finds more is expected.

 But good writers must always avoid unnecessary words. These include expressions such as ‘the reason why’ (because), ‘she is the lady who’ (she), ‘owing to the fact that’ (because or since). Nothing makes writing so bland and uninteresting as such expressions. They don’t help the reader conjure mental images to sustain interest.

VIGOROUS WRITING

In their book, Elements of Style, William Strunk and E B White wrote that “Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine unnecessary parts.

 This requires not that the writer makes all sentences short, or avoid detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell. Many expressions in common use violate this principle”.

Regarding every day expressions such as ‘the question as to whether’, which could simply be written as ‘whether’, ‘there is no doubt that’ (no doubt), ‘the reason why is that’ (because). Strunk and White argue that the expression ‘the fact that’ is an especially debilitating expression. It should be revised out of every sentence in which it occurs. Other such expressions include ‘for in fact’ and ‘for in truth.

Yet language has been corrupted on a large scale. The following caught my attention recently: ‘It don’t matter’. Indeed, this is becoming a common error in writing.

 Not much attention is being paid to tenses: past, present, future, contractions, and the rules of sentence construction. The word ‘don’t’ is a contraction of ‘do not’. As such it is interesting that one can write ‘It do not matter’ instead of ‘it doesn’t (does not) matter.