Chapter Preview: For the Love of Words

The following is excerpted from For the Love of Words, an anthology of articles, poems, short stories and illustrations from eighty-four inspirational literary voices from the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature. Produced to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Dubai’s premier literary event, the collection celebrates the contributors’ love of words, how words fuel their imagination, and how they in turn use words to fuel the imagination of millions. This unique book features both international and regional authors, journalists, poets and illustrators, with pieces in both English and Arabic.

Riz Khan is an acclaimed international journalist, television personality and creative writer. He is the author of Alwaleed: Businessman, Billionaire, Prince and “We Interrupt our Programming…”

THE LOVE OF WORDS

RIZ KHAN

IT WAS SOMETHING of an accident that words became such an important part of my life. Life and death important. Literally (no pun intended!). What makes it all the more interesting is that I had to pretty much unlearn using so many interesting words in order to use the right words instead. Confused? Then let’s take a step back.

I was born in Aden, a British colony at the time and a hub of trade that drew a diverse range of people to that Yemeni city’s thriving port. The West’s influence was strong, so I was sent as a very young child to a convent school where, as I like to put it, I had English beaten into me by nuns. In all fairness, it gave me a great advantage when civil unrest drove Britain to leave the colony – joined by my family who had lost everything to the communist regime that took over in the late 1960s. I landed in London a few months before my fifth birthday but I was a couple of years ahead of my peers when it came to my English language skills. From that early age, I started devouring any literature I came across. Books, magazines and a wide range of wonderful comics that didn’t exist in Yemen.

Medicine was my calling. I would read anything I could get my hands on. By the time I graduated in medical physiology, I was fluent and effective in the language of science. By that I mean the words I used were the kind that scientists tend to use.

Each profession seems to have its own way of speaking … constructing sentences and using words that are almost stereotypical for that field. For example, a comedic take on British policemen has them saying things like, ‘Prior to his apprehension, the perpetrator was observed perambulating the street outside the premises with suspicious intent!’

In the case of those working in the medical sciences, there is love for words such as ‘attenuate’, ‘potentiate’, ‘augment’ and ‘contraindication’.

Don’t even get me started with lawyers and their ability to employ unnecessarily long sentences of polysyllabic pontification purposely contrived to confound any normal person.

Still, for me medicine was not to be and I found myself on a postgraduate course studying radio journalism … and that’s where the unlearning came in.

In the same way the nuns beat English into me, crusty old BBC editors beat journalism into me.

Writing for newspapers, magazines, radio and television can vary greatly in not only the length of the pieces but also the style of writing. For a broadcast journalist, the print reporter has an enviably large allowance of words in comparison to the paltry amount for a radio or television report.

Three words per second was the BBC guideline for news writing when I worked there, meaning that a two-minute report (considered rather long by today’s standards) is only 120 seconds – or 360 words.

Not only that, for a television reporter good writing means not simply describing the pictures on screen but actually writing around them and using them as a tool to enhance the report. By the time I joined CNN, fast-paced American style meant that reports were even shorter—often no more than one minute. So, every word counted.

During my journalism training, I learned about the Gunning fog index – a score that determines the readability of English writing. It is calculated by examining the number of syllables, words and length of sentences. The lower the number, the easier the piece of writing is to read and the more suitable it is for a much wider audience.

A score of seven, for example, would equate to the reading level of a school seventh-grader—someone just reaching their teens. In contrast, seventeen is the fog index score for writing that is at the level of a college graduate.

Ironically, popular tabloids generally have low fog index scores … while the more intellectual publications have much higher ones but a smaller, niche consumer base.

So the unlearning I had to do was to discard the interesting words I used in the science world and thereby lower my fog score for the TV audience. From ‘augment’ to ‘increase’, from ‘attenuate’ to ‘reduce’, and so on.

What, you might be asking, did I mean by saying that words became ‘life and death’ important?

Well, at CNN I was introduced to the concept of breaking news – something the BBC did not have at the time in the early 1990s (nothing interrupted British TV programming except for the death of the Monarch). When CNN went live with breaking news, the world, especially in places like Africa and parts of the Middle East and Asia, listened intently.

For example, CNN’s reports on the outcome of a tense general election would be the main source for honest and reliable information for the voters who often did not trust their country’s own, heavily controlled media. So, if CNN reported a particular political candid was ‘ejected’ instead of ‘elected’ it could have led to deadly violent protests on the streets as people reacted to the news.

The letters J and L sit almost side by side on a keyboard, so it is easy for a news writer to accidentally alter the outcome of the script and cause real chaos somewhere far away from the newsroom! (Believe me, I am not making this up.)

Inadvertently going from the world of medical sciences to the world of broadcast journalism was when words became such an important part of my life. I had to choose them carefully every day because I was televising them across the world to inform millions of people who trusted me to give them the news accurately and honestly.

Irrespective of the TV audience to whom I spoke during my work, I learned a lesson that applies to all of us, whatever we do … and that is that words can carry a LOT of responsibility. They should be respected and used wisely.

So, thank you nuns … and thank you crusty old BBC editors!

Or was it simply him, behind it all?

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For the Love of Words is priced at AED 65.