A story headline should be short, crisp and powerful

What is it to “jeopardise employers”? I culled the italicised words from a headline on page 5 of The Standard of Tuesday, May 2.

Wrote the sub-editor (in a four-deck essay across all of three columns): “We should not jeopardise employers by increasing minimum wages when productivity has nose-dived”.

Yet, of course, the wisdom can also go the other way round.

As employees, we should not jeopardise our pay packets by allowing our inputs to take a nosedive both in quality and in quantity.

SHORT AND POWERFUL
However, the reason I call The Standard’s headline an “essay” is that it is composed of about a million words.

The sub-editor has used all of 14 words when, ideally, a newspaper headline should be made up of as few words as possible.

Indeed, atop a news item, a headline should be readable with one sweep of the eye.

Yet here we had all of a four-deck headline running across all of three columns in a six-column page.

Given the smallness of the letter size apparently instructed by the chief sub-editor — or whoever was the page designer — it naturally produced a 14-word headline across three columns and four decks deep.

SPEAK OUT
Although each sub-editor must give the chief sub-editor every form of respect, no sub-editor is worth the title if he takes the chief sub’s instructions as God’s.

No, you are not called upon to take his or her instructions like automata.

Whenever faced with a command that seems unintelligent or even dangerous, the intelligent sub-editor should politely remind whoever is chief-subbing on the occasion that what he or she has demanded is neither possible nor even good for the paper’s ideals and image.

Many of its readers might have noticed, moreover, that the word “nosedived” was hyphenated into “nose-dived”.

No, whether used as a verb or as a noun, nosedive is one word.

As a verb, it means to fall perpendicularly, the nose downwards — from, for instance, a tall tree or, as a swimmer, into a pool of water.

NOSEDIVE
It looks probable, nevertheless, that the word nosedive came from swimming or skiing.

In swimming, it would originally have meant to jump into water with the nose pointing to the centre of the earth.

That is why to nosedive is a forceful metaphor for to perform extremely poorly after a period of sheen in, for instance, the classroom or an athletics discipline.

In other words, metaphorically, you can “fall by the nose” in swimming as well as in an examination and other competitive human endeavours, including as a producer of items both for domestic consumption and for exchange in the national or international marketplace.

Thus, in the Standard’s case that we used as our peg, what you may jeopardise by your shoddy work is not the employer as such but only his or her ability or willingness to remunerate you more attractively.

The only way you can motivate him or her is to improve both the quality and the quantity of your input into whatever is his or her stock-in-trade.

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