It’s as if media organisations no longer have gruff chiefs of staff who teach young reporters how to write.
Many years ago my boss was the redacteur-en-chef, but that was in Paris at Agence France-Presse. Nowadays, you’ll see the words redact and redacted everywhere. In English. The Latin root of the word means to bring things together, to shape something, usually a piece of writing … Editing is the right word for it.
Somehow, though, the latest usages of redact and redacted are supposed to mean that certain words have been omitted, deleted and censored from a report. This usage is wrong. The act of editing — shaping words for brevity and meaning — is very different from deleting passages to sanitise a report. Why do professional writers jump on stupid new usages just because they’re there? Most come from the USA, and although the country’s creative writing is without peer, its media practitioners online and in the mainstream media abuse English as if it’s a Guantanamo inmate.
Let’s delete redact and redacted. Censor and censored are the correct substitutes.
Australian newspaper writing continues to throw up appalling English. The fifth paragraph of a recent news report on nepotism in government schools floored me. In a document identifying examples of the phenomenon, schools and staff involved were ‘de-identified’. De-identified! I spilled my Weetbix. Anonymous is the word. And the same reporter wrote a few paragraphs later that a principal and two assistant principals were involved in the appointment of multiple family members.
The truly appalling multiple. Reporter, were there few or many family members appointed? Multiple is a rubbish word. It tells readers nothing. Don’t use it.