Daily Express, July 7, 2017
In a closely fought contest, here is the clear winner of Worst Headline Of The Year So Far. The first rule of headline writing is that it should have some relevance to the story. The expression ‘bah humbug’ is related to Dickens’s Scrooge and Christmas. ‘Baaah humbug’ suggests, if anything, miserly sheep. In any case a sheep’s sound is conventionally rendered as ‘baa’.
I would suggest:
Sheep do the dirty
on racing cyclists
Now to the story (47 words). How were the sheep droppings sprayed? Accidentally or deliberately? ‘On to’ is two words, not one. You don’t need ‘people’ unless you feel it necessary to point out that cyclists are human beings, not giraffes. Similarly you don’t need ‘the athletes’. It would be neater to say ‘since then’ rather than ‘following the event’, though you don’t need either. You don’t need to repeat the number 50 or the word ‘race’. This is how I would do it:
More than 50 cyclists have fallen ill after riding through sheep droppings during a road race. They were among 300 taking part in the 245 km (152 miles) three-day TransOsterdalen event in southern Norway last month. The droppings sprayed the victims, who have since suffered fever, stomach pain and diarrhoea. (48 words)
The Times, July 8, 2017
It is poor practice to use the same words in the intro and heading, and exceptionally poor practice to use them in the caption as well. You could rephrase the intro to make it:
Andy Murray subjected fans to the first of his traditional Wimbledon nailbiters last night as he fought through to round four for the tenth year.
The caption could be one of many things, for example:
Andy Murray: Saved five set points against Italy’s Fabio Fognini
The Times, July 7, 2017
Yet another wrong verb. The past tense of ‘spring’ is ‘sprang’. ‘Sprung’ is the past participle and the passive, eg ‘the boat had sprung a leak’ or ‘he was sprung from jail’. See Post 130 for my handy chart of verbs.
‘Purrfect’ was already worn out in the 1950s. It is pathetic to see it now.
The Times, July 6, 2017
The words ‘face to face’ (incidentally I would hyphenate the phrase when it is used as an adjective like this) are superfluous. We can assume they did not sit back to back or behind screens. Every word should be weighed.
i newspaper, July 4, 2017
(69 words) You can’t say someone is a double Paralympic champion without saying what both sports are. The usual speedy check reveals that Cox won gold in cycling and 400m sprinting.
This is how I would do it:
Kadeena Cox, champion at last year’s Rio Paralympics in both sprinting and cycling, is considering concentrating on the latter to break into open competition with her Olympic counterparts. Cox, 26, from Leeds, said: ‘I’ve not cycled for that long and the times I’m doing are up there in terms of able-bodied stuff.’ She was the first Briton in 32 years to win gold in two sports at the same Paralympics. (70 words)
This identifies both sports at the beginning, places the quote next to the intro, to expand it, and moves the history to the end.
i newspaper, July 3, 2017 – Page One
‘Anyone for tennis?’ is one of the corniest cliches there is, and I guess I have seen it several hundred times. You have got to do better than this lazy and boring offering. I would simply have put:
Murray fit for
Wimbledon
Reports: p12, 50-51
Sunday Times, July 2, 2017
Regular readers will know that this should be ‘sank’, the past tense of ‘sink’. ‘Sunk’ is the past participle, which goes with forms of ‘have’, such as ‘he had sunk his teeth into the sandwich’ or ‘he has sunk his teeth into the sandwich’. ‘Sunk’ is also the passive voice, as in ‘the ship was sunk by a torpedo’. (The passive voice is when something is done to an object, as opposed to the active voice, when a subject does something.)
Since English refuses to stick to rules, I have drawn up a chart of some verbs which seem to cause confusion. I will add more if I think of them. Obviously some verbs, such as ‘swim’, do not have a passive voice, or at least I can’t think of such a sentence.
| Present tense | Past tense | Past participle / pluperfect / passive |
| sink | sank | sunk |
| swim | swam | swum |
| shrink | shrank | shrunk |
| spin | spun | spun |
| swing | swung | swung |
| ring | rang | rung |
| sing | sang | sung |
| fling | flung | flung |
| string | strung | strung |
| sting | stung | stung |
| run | ran | run |
| drink | drank | drunk |
| wring | wrung | wrung |
| cling | clung | clung |
| stink | stank | stunk |
| bring | brought | brought |
| hang | hung (execution: hanged) |
hung |
| slink | slunk | slunk |
The Times, July 1, 2017
If, as a London-based writer, you feel the need to be mildly patronising about the North, at least get the spelling right. This should be ‘gradely’, to rhyme with ‘Madeley’, not ‘gradley’, which would rhyme with ‘badly’.
i newspaper, July 1, 2017
I assume the writer of this letter to the editor knows how to spell his home town, so someone must have changed it from the correct Northwich to the incorrect Northwitch. This is unforgivable.