If you're not a columnist, keep it professional

A good friend and newspaper reporter/editor always used to drill the people he trained not to write the way they talk. He probably could have applied it to me when I first started writing professionally.

As a columnist, I can relax that standard a bit and allow my writing to develop its own voice. A little bit of voice can be a dangerous thing in pop culture, especially if you’re a reporter, commentator or politician.

I think I’ll probably scream out loud the next time I see or hear a reporter or politician use the term nothingburger. If it’s a burger, it’s not nothing. It’s delicious. If it’s a story that doesn’t live up to its hype, why are you still wasting air talking about it or newsprint writing about it?

Personally, if you need to bring lack of a burger into the lexicon, let’s go back to, “Where’s the beef.” Yeah, that one got old pretty fast too.

On-camera personalities, high-paid personalities make more than their share of mistakes these days. The problem may be with the writers but if I’m going to put my name on it, I think it would be a good idea to read it over carefully.

Another of my recent pet peeves with language has been order takers or online service reps who continually use the word “perfect” after everything I say. I finally snapped one night at a restaurant and told my waitress that I would be the judge of whether or not my food was perfect after she brought it out.

My wife was not happy with me so I further enabled the young lass by giving her a larger than normal tip. One way or another, she wasn’t going to forget her encounter with me.

One of the phrases that gets me going when talking to a salesperson is opening with, “I won’t lie to you.” If you’re offering up that disclosure I’m immediately assuming you’re lying to me. If you’re working in sales don’t bring up the idea that you could be lying to your customer.

I understand that language has got to evolve we just need to be careful about how it happens. If it’s humor most things go. If it’s in a professional setting with a larger audience make your speech as plainspoken as possible and measure the jokes and slang carefully.

Develop your editorial voice on your own time unless of course you happen to have a local Sunday column, in which case it’s OK to serve up nothingburgers as regular fare.

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at: [email protected]