The tale of being stylish

WHEN the New Age planners were having working sessions, between countless chats over tea down the store-cum-press in the Holiday Building, each time people dropping by, invited or looking for a job, everyone was thinking of how the newspaper should shape up. But nobody at the time, in fact, talked of any stylebook that the newspaper should be going to have.

Only one or two of the editors at the time, in passing, said that news stories edited should have a similar look. Across the pages? They were not sure. Some of the editors opposed the idea. Some kept silent, waiting for chances to speak up later.

It was the news editor, Mir Ashfaquzzaman, who first broached the idea of having a stylebook. That was in April 2003. The newspaper hit the stand on June~7. In mid-October, he came up with a rough guideline — with some entries and detailed explanations with enough localised examples, modelled on the stylebook of the Economist.

The first draft of the stylebook was ready by mid-February 2004. It was given for review to a group of eight that included two deputy editors, Akhtarul Haque and Nurul Kabir, associate editor Tarik Ahsan, news editor, chief correspondent Farid Ahmed, and two deputy managing editors, Sayed Talat Kamal and Zayd Almer Khan.

The preliminary review was complete and the final draft was given again for review, in mid-May, to a group of three that included the news editor and deputy managing editor Almer Khan. The group composed the style committee, officially or unofficially, at least for the first edition. Three of the committee people reviewed the content, for three times.

The stylebook, with more than 1,200 headword entries, was ready by June 5, 2004, waiting to go to the printers. The compilation began based on the mistakes the editors and reporters at New Age have made in the past one year. Dispatches by the correspondents sitting in other cities or towns did also count. Entries have been heavily drawn from the stylebooks of noted news houses.

The style committee first began with the Economist stylebook, the only one at that time almost all the members have had a glance at. But soon New Age needed to be a bit irreverent, unlike the Economist. The stylebooks, in print or electronic form, of the Reuters, Guardian, (London) Times, Associated Press, South Asian Journalists’ Association and some (in)significant online sheets for the journalists of this region came to be consulted.

But it took a lot to be irreverent and set guidelines to break out of the customary way of report writing or editing. Capitalisation was the first cumbersome issue the committee faced. The members first planned to do away with as much of capitalisation as possible. Presidential or ministerial designations were put in lower case unless in the full form. The decision began to bug the editors: home affairs minister plus the name worked well.

But what about the state minister? People are used to hearing ‘state minister for home affairs’, and in the full form, it warranted upstyle, word-initial letters in upper case. But how can minister be in lower case and state minister in the upper especially when both of them attended the same meeting? The rule was overruled. Designations, not salaried titles, in any form before names were put in upper case: the rest are in the lower. The rule has continued to work well. The only problem that remains is to tell designations from salaried titles.

In all other such cases, lower-case beginning was agreed on. But the associate editor preferred at least ‘cabinet’, ‘constitution’ and ‘resolution’ to be capped. Nurul Kabir wanted only ‘cabinet’ and ‘constitution’ in upper case. Why? To make — specifically ‘look’, not ‘sound’ — them different from chest of drawers, the act of forming and willingness. But no one signals capitalisation in the spoken form and a minister necessarily needs to be in the cabinet of the government, which sometimes sits in a room, and clothes in the cabinet, preferably inside a room. That was not all. The problem kept persisting with the speaker at a gathering and the speaker of the parliament, and the house people live in and the house where lawmakers strut and fret. The rule was changed: ‘house’ is best avoided to mean the parliament, unless such changes would mean sacrilege.

The second problem was the use of abbreviations and acronyms. This was no brainer: they are best avoided, unless in headlines; copies can have abbreviations and acronyms as adjectives. But editors and reporters had a hard time to stomach that they would not be allowed to write series of loaded single-letter signifiers, placed one after another in upper case, only to grate on eyes and make no sense. Reporters try to get away by writing expressions such as the NCPPGWRMNC, to mean ‘the national council to protect port, gas and water resources from multi-national companies’, where a simple ‘the council’ would do. The editors also let it go, without caring much for the readers and saving themselves the trouble of finding out the expression ‘the council’.

When the news of the compilation was announced, especially at one of the regular meetings of subeditors, and then among the reporters, people at New Age felt elated, to become the first in Bangladesh to have such a stylebook. And the wait, both by the subeditors and reporters, began.

Reporters began to get away writing things the way they usually do, not minding the editors’ lectures, saying that they had no guideline before them. Similar was the case with subeditors; they continued aberration from the agreed principles saying that the stylebook was still not at hand. Editing for a few weeks after the meeting where some rules were agreed on or explained showed that it takes time to be ‘stylish’.

Such a situation continued for long. And the writers and editors complained of not having the stylebook in time. Some of them thought that the task was not entrusted with the proper person, the compiler, as he had been taking long; some thought that the work was almost impossible for him to complete, as many things would not be well considered or would remain ignored; there were yet some others who kept harping on, asking for the final product. Some of them expected much from the stylebook. Many thought it would teach them grammar; a few thought it would turn out to be another practical dictionary for New Age writers and editors. A few of them thought that the stylebook would teach them common sense and not to write or allow sentences such as ‘an unidentified body has been identified as unidentified’.

As the compilation neared completion, many of them were joyous to know that printing would be late, as they could continue deviating from the verbally set norms of spellings or punctuation marks. A few of them appeared relieved of anxiety that they would not need to go through the book and not to keep following the rules set in the stylebook at least for some more weeks.

A text editor was kept open during all these days while subeditors were at work. Misspellings, grammatical errors and pet peeves were noted down to be analysed and incorporated in the stylebook later. The text file kept growing, with confusables and errors — the use of ‘while’ and ‘however’; spelling of ‘Roquiah’ and ‘Husaini Dalan’; if the past perfect tense is needed; sequence of tenses, which wire services conveniently chose to ignore; formulas for conversion of traditional English measures into SI units, and many more.

The debates, while editing, especially late into night, over the use of the word ‘terrorists’ to mean ‘criminals’ or ‘outlaws’ to mean ‘underground party activists’ and many other such things also found a place in the note. Many rules were set at the regular meetings and many --of them were overruled, on conscious decisions or for sheer forgetfulness, during work. Rules were set and rules were broken, every now and then. The editors made it a point to stand corrected the next day even something was, consciously or by mistake, printed wrong the previous day. The number of entries kept growing, adding more pages to the book.

Almer Khan would run hurriedly to the note-taker, asking if there was still any space for one more entry in the planned 16 formes that covers 160 pages. Writers would write ‘real killers’ and the book should have an entry on this redundancy: killers need to be real, otherwise they are not fit for the label ‘killer’; there cannot be ‘false killers’.

Such happenings continued to mark the compilation even after the final draft has been prepared. One from the New Age Xtra team, Mahtab Haider, suddenly came up with an entry: update, upgrade; hospitals cannot be updated, they are upgraded; and files or web sites are updated. The final draft has by then been waiting for the deputy editor’s coup de grace.

When the first draft was given for review, Tarik Ahsan only double-underlined the entry-initial letters — he made the lower cases upper, at the beginning of the entries — across the first few pages and agreed to all what was proposed in the book. He has not noticed that all the entries in the book begin with lower case letters and they finish with semicolons, unless the style calls for a period at the place.

Nurul Kabir, who sometimes appears to be somewhat democratic when deciding on certain finer aspects of grammar, asking two or three editors, asserted his single-mindedness when deciding on something in his own writing, citing legal nuances and philosophical elucidation. He insisted on the compiler’s changing the word ‘should’ to ‘must’ in the preface to the book as ‘should’ may be interpreted as somewhat lenient obligation on the part of editors or reporters. He also found objectionable certain other words, which might mean something else when read as part of the text of Immanuel Kant or the constitution of Bangladesh, but make perfect sense in everyday speeches or writing.

Tarik Ahsan has every now and then agreed to certain principles; back at his desk, he flouted all what he agreed on, eliciting an innocuous comment from the news editor. Reading over for pet peeves in copies re-edited by the editor, Enayetullah Khan, and annoyed at silly mistakes the writers could have made, he often asked if the editor has read the stylebook. No, he has not. Not till now. The book has not been in print as yet.

Why? For the poor mathematics and poor knowledge of computer systems the compiler has been known for. The book was planned to be designed by a typesetting program called \TeX, which does not call for human intervention for many of layout things. The book was finished as soon as editing was complete. The page size, type size and margins were calculated and fixed on an oversight that the printer had shipped out the pages 2.9 per cent shorter. The book spanned, or was made to span, 160 pages.

In the meantime, the foreword, preface and the epilogue went to the deputy editor, for some corrections, additions and deletions. And the oversight was detected. When the texts reached the compiler again, the computer system the printer was attached with crashed. Booted again, the printer shipped out the pages the same size as what was intended. The calculation oversight could not be repeated. The page size grew out of the paper size, prompting a fresh layout, adding one more forme, and delaying the production. Poor maths, pesky oversight!

Akkas, Abu Jar M. (2004 Aug. 7). The tale of being stylish. New Age anniversary special. S6

Rev.: vi·vi·mmxxiii