Little words help us avoid ambiguity and add a little sense to the world, when used well. When we intentionally leave them out, for example to write headlines, we sometimes end up with confusion. I misread this headline, fresh out of the Reuters news factory, because I was distracted and thinking about the dishes from tonight’s dinner, still waiting to be done. “Facebook shares sink as reality overtakes hype.

My first thought was that this must be about the work space at FB offices, something about their kitchens. Took a minute to sink in.

Update Tuesday, the article has been replaced! So link above went dead and here is the new story, via Yahoo, which adds a word to fix the problem. The editorial desk at Reuters is hard at work.

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Singapore has worked it out: if you want people to love good English, you have to make it fun. The Speak Good English Movement on Facebook does it really well. A must-read: “A teacher presented each child in her class with the first half of a well-known proverb and asked them to complete it. The results are below…”

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The best and brightest of American writing were named by Columbia University’s Pulitzer Prize board Monday 16 April and among them were journalists and poets, but no fiction writers. What an extraordinary statement this makes about the current state of the art in the US, which at last count, in 2009, was the world’s largest producer of books, with 288,000 published that year according to Unesco.

The last time there was no Pulitzer fiction award was in 1977. The Pulitzer Prize board has not provided any explanation and, curiously, given that the award is one of the biggest for fiction in the US, American media are focusing more on the journalism award going to a 23-year-old than to the fact that no one wrote a novel considered big enough for the fiction prize.

Three books were nominated as finalists for the $10,000 award (from the Pulitzer site):

“Train Dreams,” by Denis Johnson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a novella about a day laborer in the old American West, bearing witness to terrors and glories with compassionate, heartbreaking calm; “Swamplandia!” by Karen Russell (Alfred A. Knopf), an adventure tale about an eccentric family adrift in its failing alligator-wrestling theme park, told by a 13-year-old heroine wise beyond her years, and “The Pale King,” by the late David Foster Wallace (Little, Brown and Company), a posthumously completed novel, animated by grand ambition, that explores boredom and bureaucracy in the American workplace.

The three jurors were Susan Larson, former book editor, The Times-Picayune, and host of “The Reading Life” at WWNO-FM radio (chair),
Maureen Corrigan, critic in residence, Georgetown University, and book critic on NPR’s “Fresh Air”, Michael Cunningham, novelist, New York City.

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – There are few politicians I’m as pleased to listen to as former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and it has nothing to do with the value of what he’s saying. He has one of the most delightful accents in the English-speaking world, the one that tops my list (certain soft Irish accents run a close second) as the most melodic: a Ghanaian English accent. He is also, of course, worth listening to because he is an extraordinary statesman and diplomat.

I’ve just read with huge pleasure that not everyone in Ghana thinks they should be speaking what they call BBC English, as the Guardian reports. Fortunately, enough people jig the language somewhere between the BBC and local languages, turning what they speak into music that makes you want to ask them to keep talking. If the Guardian is right, Ghanaian English is becoming more widespread and more accepted.

Check it out for yourself in this 2010 BBC video debate filmed in Geneva, “Will the real Africa please stand up?”, featuring two once-Genevans, Annan and Patina Gappah, Zimbabwe writer who was previously a lawyer in Geneva, who won the Guardian First Book Award in December 2009.

I haven’t heard Gappah speak, but I’ve read her writing and it is another laudable contribution to English as the world lives it.

Long live Africa’s contribution to the richness of English!

ZURICH, SWITZERLAND – Young people in Switzerland are online, no doubt about it with Switzerland having among Europe’s highest figures for Internet use, but they are still reading newspapers and magazines, in almost the same numbers as in 2003. The figures are part of media statistics published by Wemf, a group owned by major Swiss media, which provides certified numbers for the advertising industry.

Some 24,000 young people from 14-29 years old were questioned about 115 magazines and 190 newspapers, between October 2010 and September 2011. An average business day shows 49.1 percent of them reading at least one of these publications and 86.1 percent say they regularly read them. The free newspapers are hugely popular for commuters and many Swiss students take the train and/or bus to school or work, a factor that has probably helped keep the figures constant for the past 8 years.

Dinty W Moore, Mary Pecaut and Bret Lott at the Geneva Writers' Conference 2012 (photo, Elisabeth Boquet)

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The Geneva Writers’ Group will turn 20 next year and as its 2012 conference drew to a close last weekend, it was clear that the group has matured into a body that today offers an established, “adult” level conference for writers who are looking to become, or already are, serious professionals.

The first conference was held in 1998.

Regular monthly workshops for members cover a variety of topics. The conference, held every two years, takes this a step further, offering “high-level instruction, support and feedback through workshops, discussions, and readings”.

The 2012 conference was sold out, as was the previous one. Some 210 people attended from 30 countries if local expats’ nationalities are considered, “with writers flying in for the weekend from Australia, Iran, Qatar, Kenya, Italy, Austria, United Kingdom and the USA,” according to the group’s founder, Susan Tiberghien.

The list of instructors was impressive and included, for fiction, writers Patricia Duncker, Sheila Kohler and Bret Lott; for non-fiction Nick Barlay, Dinty W Moore and Geneva-based Susan Tiberghien (who founded the conference). Poetry and playwriting instructors led sessions, as did sevral editors and agents (complete programme).

The value of quality conferences like this cannot be understated in an era where digital publishing makes it too easy to put your words into book form. A steady stream of unsolicited self-published books, almost all of them short on professionalism, comes my way for review, and while I admire the determination it takes to write a book from start to finish, I am not happy about the lack of respect for professional skills. Sometimes it is simply naivete. But writers need to keep in mind that readers deserve and demand books whose authors have mastered technical skills, understand the value of good layouts, have taken on board time to proofread and the cost of editorial help.

Professional writers work hard, mostly without much glory or money. Meetings like the Geneva Writers Conference are a wonderful source of inspiration and help to those willing to take the trouble to ask for it; these are the writers who have earned their audiences.

When I see a press release that has something like this at the top I think the senders haven’t quite worked out that even smart people who like dictionaries can’t be bothered to decipher what they mean, and might not bother to read further. When you write for an audience as opposed to defending a thesis before academics, try to keep in mind that we’re all busy, distracted and probably in a hurry. In this case, the World Economic Forum forgot:

“A dystopian world, unsafe safeguards and the dark side of connectivity are this year’s major risk cases.”

Here are two sentences that would benefit from an extra word or two to avoid confusion. Writers often take these shortcuts to avoid being pedantic. Fair enough, but it’s better to be clear. See if you can work out the problem; I’ll post my edited versions tomorrow.

from CNN:

The suspect allegedly shot and killed a man who had just withdrawn 200,000 yuan ($31,700) from a bank in Nanjing’s Dongmen Street on January 6 and then fled the scene in a car, China’s state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

from the Atlantic:

The average first-time mother is as old as any country in the OECD (30), and the career costs of having a child are sky-high.

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Beware who you criticize and for what, for you could be next in line! The last laugh is on me, after poking fun at headline writers who are too rushed to reread what they have written. I just published this: “Thieves caught robbing Nyon train station safe”.

A minute later I happened to reread it on the published page and realized it sounds like they made a safe getaway. Not so! Here’s the corrected version: “Thieves caught robbing safe at Nyon train station” – and they are now behind bars.

A growing number of readers of news are reading fewer and fewer words from articles, with many of them never making it past the headline, so I repeat my argument that getting these right matters.

Which reminds me of one I’ve been chewing over since I read it in the Irish Times and then the BBC the other day, a reference to “the worst recession in memory”.

I’ve been trying to work out whose memory we’re referring to, or if this should have been the more popular “in recent memory” (google that and you’ll start to see what it means to use a clichéd phrase) or perhaps “in living memory” in which case who is the oldest person alive who can share personal memories from the Great Recession of the 30s?

The Guardian had a twist on it, which makes more sense than the others: “Ireland’s love of print can survive the worst of recessions” / This is a small country of 4.5 million but these are people who buy newspapers.

Headlines at newspapers used to be written mainly by young writers starting out in journalism who were given the job as a kind of proving ground. Today, most journalists write their own headlines, and these should be better.

Sometimes we get it wrong, though, first time around.

The knotty business of knowledge, complexity and language

Russell Smith at the Globe & Mail in Canada writes about the many curious aspects of our culture(s) such as “Who would have thought reality TV could spawn so much junk”. His latest, “Complex ideas can’t always be made simple” offers reflections on how well a competition for PhD students in Australia works. The students are given three minutes to crunch down their theses into a kind of elevator pitch for their work, to be presented to an audience of non-specialists, and the best speaker wins $5,000. Most of them are quite impressive, says Smith. See for yourself: the 2011 Three Minute Thesis Competition, September 2011

“This looks like a brilliant and progressive idea,” he writes. “It attacks the ivory tower; it builds bridges between specialists and the intelligent laypeople whose tax dollars fund universities; it encourages the development of teaching and performance skills among people who are going to be teachers for the rest of their lives. Universities have long been criticized for spending too much money on obscure research and not doing enough to teach teaching.”

From the film "10,000 Miles" by Liam Bates and Patrick Caracas, a "Selection" at the Lucerne International Film Festival" October 2011

But it doesn’t always work, he argues, in large part because of the differences between the humanities and the sciences.

He addresses the relationship between complexity and knowledge, one we too often skirt. Smith is talking about the social sciences and the jargon of social theory, explaining that “the idea is generally that we can’t see the ideological and economic structures that we live in unless we change our language – for language is a pillar of that very structure. Furthermore, the veneration of clarity or simplicity is itself an ideological position, one that limits thinkers to conventional thoughts.”

I’m a strong proponent of plain English, particularly in education and the workplace, where jargon and complex language often veil a lack of clear thinking. But a distinction needs to be made by people who push for plain English. Complex ideas often cannot be reduced down to simple ideas, or suffer if they do; plain English is needed because simple and elegant language can help us explore complexity, not annihilate it.

Embracing complexity: an inheritance that doesn’t diminish

If there is one kind of wealth I would like to leave to the next generation it is the ability to seek out complexity, to understand it, to appreciate rather than fear it, and ultimately to be able to express it. I would like them to have this ability whether they apply it to physics, politics or the affairs of the human heart. These are the riches that make us truly human.

I’m heading off now to the Lucerne International Film Festival to represent my son’s film, “10,000 Miles“, about traveling from Lhasa in Tibet to Shanghai with three other young men (and about young people there). It is a Selection at the festival (he’s in China and can’t make it). I asked him to send me questions and answers for the FAQ session that is scheduled after the film’s European premiere tonight.

Most are about the technical aspects of the film or details about their travels. I’m particularly happy about the last one, which leaves us with the idea that these travels are the start of a much longer voyage, for all of us.

Liam, who is fluent in Mandarin, has traveled extensively in Tibet, on several occasions.

Q: What do you think about the Tibet-China issue?

A: It is far too complicated to answer in a couple short questions and I woud avoid doing this because it is one of the issues that people most love to jump to conclusions about. To really understand it takes knowing a lot of history, languages and culture; it isn’t as simple a topic as it is often made out to be.

Film’s trailer, posted by the festival