Please let's not just write, but communicate

I want to plead with all who write for publication in the media (newspapers, television, radio and internet) to always keep in mind their basic aim for writing, which is to communicate, whenever they write.

In order to communicate to anyone, the communicator must use language common to the person or people he or she wants to communicate with. In Journalism, we are taught to use simple and easy-to-understand words in our work, for it is more about being able to put across your ideas to the public than how well you know the English language.

I am making this appeal because of a feature story I read from Joy FM's website on Monday the 11th. The article was titled "Okoampa-Ahoofe: In The Choice of His Brother, Mills Bests Kufuor!" written by Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D, Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at the Nassou Community College of State University of New York, Garden City. It was as I read this article that I came face to face with the reality of all that our lecturers have been teaching us.

There are three things that I noticed about the text. First of all, the whole text was too long. My eyes and back were hurting by the time I was done reading it. Secondly the sentences were also too long (one sentence had five lines making up a paragraph). The third and most important thing I noticed about it was that the words were too difficult to understand. I read it twice and still couldn't make much of it. I had to print it out (that gave me two A4 sheet pages) and take it home to be able to use the dictionary in my attempt to understand it.

Thinking about the difficulty I had with the text made me wonder what JHS and SHS students would do with such a text, not to talk of those who do not have that much education. I also wondered if he had written his piece for only people who had his academic background. Yet in the last line of the second paragraph of his text he says, "...we shall promptly bring it to public attention and scrutiny." I understand public to include stack illiterates, half literates, and elites. For the purpose of making his text easy to understand by all, words such as, disingenuously, impugned, otiose, moot, and unregenerate (just to mention a few), could have been replaced with simple synonyms such as insincerely, disputed, practically useless, debatable, and unrepentant respectively.

With all due respect, my intention is not to criticise his work, but my concern is with how his text can achieve his aim of wanting to communicate, the next time he tries to put across his ideas. I repeat my plea to all who write including myself, let's please try our best to communicate whenever we sit down to write.

credit: Judith Tetteh
Ghana Institute Of Journalism
Ridge-Accra