Episode 35 - an opinion articles special with Harriet Williamson

Welcome to Lexis, the podcast all about language and linguistics. I'm Lisa Casey. I'm Jackie Glancy. I'm Dan Clayton. And I'm Jill Lavender. On this episode of Lexis, we are going to start with the Langan News and then we're going to move into an interview with Harriet Williamson, who is Commissioning Editor of Voices at the Independent newspaper. What we thought would be good with this is to link together these two parts because...

Harriet is talking about how to write opinion pieces we thought it would be useful to do a section on analysing an opinion piece.

in this first lang in the news bit so what we're going to do is we're going to focus on an article that was in the daily telegraph back in september 2022 have a look at some of the letters in response to that that came soon afterwards so we'll be analyzing this article in detail pulling it apart

looking at how he presents his ideas about some of the complaints that Amal Rajan has raised around Accent. And this all links to a recent programme for BBC that Amal Rajan has done called Cracking the Class Ceiling, which looks at class and education. and employment and careers, and includes an interesting section about accent and accent discrimination, particularly how people with what are perceived to be working class or, quote marks, regional accents.

are discriminated against in the workplace so it all connects to accent bias and attitudes, which we've covered a lot on this podcast in previous episodes as well. So let's go into the analysis of the article to begin with. Okay, so I was particularly interested in the headline, which reads, Amal Rajan's attack... on Posh.

presenters is pure inverted snobbery. And the word posh is in inverted commas there. I thought this was interesting because from a kind of a grammatical construction, we've got Amal Rajan's attack on posh presenters functioning as the

subject of that sentence. And then we've got a subject kind of compliment construction. So the attack is pure inverted snobbery. So what I thought was... was clever about this is the way that something that is clearly an opinion is presented as if it is kind of verifiable fact. So one thing is something else. Whereas when you start to unpick it, you could really challenge pretty much everything about the headline. Yeah.

It's the declarative nature of a headline as well, right? It's opinion presented as fact. I really like his interesting use of the metaphorical noun attack. Amal Rajan's attack on posh presenters kind of suggests... that he's out to get a really particular type of presenter and somebody who really isn't worthy of attack from this.

little upstart, Amal Rajan, which kind of sets the tone for the rest of the article, which is really designed to undermine Amal Rajan's argument about class and accent bias. Without really addressing any of the issues around class and accent bias, I think we all agreed that actually a lot of this particular op-ed is an attack on Amal Rajan himself and the things that the writer sets him up to represent rather than...

dealing with the issues that the Ammarajan programme raises about working class accent and discrimination. Yeah, and I think that whole thing you say about the attack is interesting because I think it's, you know, like a lot of the language, you kind of expect to see hyperbolic language in a...

opinion pieces to an extent but it does it does make it sound like it's a more a more kind of vicious sort of thing that Amal Rajan's doing than his rather kind of gentle approach that he actually takes in some of the comments he's made about his fellow presenters because he's a BBC

Radio 4 presenter himself it's not like he's launched this you know a literal attack on his presenters in the studio for being posh it's not just the attack bit it's maybe the whole kind of class war narrative isn't it pure inverted snobbery as if he's got a chip on his shoulder and that idea of snobbery is often turned around by

the rich, the upper class, to suggest that it's something that's being directed at them, inverted snobbery. And it sounds really, really serious here, but it is kind of countered by the opening paragraph that sets itself, that kind of sets up the narrative voice as a...

of a humorous one. So the first paragraph says, thanks to the collapse of the pound, eye-watering mortgage bills, the threat of nuclear apocalypse, and Gareth Southgate's refusal to replace Harry Maguire at centre-half. Watching the news is already depressing enough. They kind of...

They use this listing mechanism to try and set out how awful the world is. And I think the implicature there is that Amal Rajan has chosen something that isn't really worthy of talking about in a context where lots of things are. actually quite bad. And all of that is set up to kind of undermine Amarajan's credibility point argument, etc. Yeah. And I mean, I think it's interesting to then think about where it removes because...

there's quite a lot of qualification in the language used in the next paragraph. So he says, this is Michael Deacon, who's written the article, says, in his view... they sound far too posh. And as a result, he believes they're utterly unrepresentative of the wider public, according to Rajan.

only 10% of British people speak RP, yet among news presenters, he claims. So if you kind of look at all of those bits where it's something attributed to Amal Rajan, in his view, he believes, according to Rajan, he claims. So there is that sort of distance.

device used isn't there to make it sound like right here are his observations here are his claims here are his beliefs sort of holding them at arm's length a little bit and it's those little kind of clause elements in a couple of those are like reporting clauses almost aren't they or like working is like adverbials to sort of distance.

Michael Deacon from Amal Rajan's points to show that he's holding them at arm's length a bit. And what you'd ordinarily get then is a counter to the points that Rajan has made. So of course he's just quoted Amal Rajan claims that it's about 70%. of BBC presenters you speak with an RP accent. And what you would expect then is some kind of counterclaim. But what we get instead in the next paragraph is him making a joke that actually Amal Rajan presents about 80% of BBC's programmes himself.

doesn't really counter it instead he just makes a point about Amal Rajan himself rather than about the claim that Amal Rajan has made it seems more like a deflection really doesn't it because you're expecting oh well okay then so you know if it's not 10% of people speaking RP, and if it's not 70% of newsreaders speaking RP, what is it? But instead, you don't get that information at all, but you kind of led down a path. You led to sort of disbelieve the figures that Rajang is presenting.

but then you're not giving anything concrete that actually tells you that he is wrong. So I think it is quite cleverly done, but it's a little bit disingenuous, I think. Yeah. And then when you get onto kind of the... a bit more of the sort of substance of Michael Deacon's criticism of what Rajan's putting forward. He says, at any rate, Rajan is determined to end, and then this is a great noun phrase, this tyranny of the well-spoken.

And it's just pulling apart that phrase. I mean, when you look at it, tyranny as an abstract noun has got all of those kind of connotations of power that's completely unchecked.

you know tyrannical rulers who you know despotic rulers and the tyranny of the well-spoken so it's kind of the what the despotic rule of people who can speak well and that whole idea that rp is like good speech is like well spoken is such a dodgy concept lots of linguists would kind of argue it's you know it's a very it's a very loaded way of describing it but it does sound like this you know this

hugely powerful group, you know, dominate society and dominate the BBC. It's that deliberate hyperbole, isn't it? Because when it says Rajan is determined to end this tyranny, then you made to... view his position as something ridiculous because, of course, nobody has, you know, nobody's behaving in a tyrannical way, but that's not what.

what anybody is arguing, but it's that kind of misrepresentation of anybody who suggests that perhaps not all BBC newsreaders or presenters need to speak yeah and it kind of goes back to Lisa's point in the start doesn't it about that opening paragraph about sort of undermining through the use of those sort of humorous devices about here are the important things in the world and here's what he's decided to focus on

And again, that sort of idea that he's this little man fighting to overturn this terrible tyranny, like it doesn't exist, that it's an overstatement. So interestingly, for context, what he then goes on to talk about is how...

Amarajan has not only made the documentary, he's also urged Tim Davey, the BBC's director general, to give more jobs to people with, quote, strong regional working class accents. So there's this idea that Amarajan is sort of... actively trying to counter accent discrimination. And again, a kind of suggestion that maybe he's overstepping his boundaries a little bit. But also, again, in the next paragraph, he doesn't address that.

He actually, again, just attacks Amal Rajan personally. So the next paragraph says, Devi has promised he will. And this worries me slightly because whenever a job opens up at the BBC, it invariably goes to Rajan. And again, he makes a light, humorous comment. the man himself rather than addressing the issue of accent discrimination in elite broadcasting institutions. So he does exactly what he's done earlier on in the article too. It is clever, isn't it? It's kind of dismissing.

really important ideas because you know that that would be something that would be really interesting to talk about you know whether or not there should be more more regional accents within the BBC but rather than give that any kind of airplay or kind of well, word count here. He just decides to completely discount that with flipping remarks about Amal Rajan instead. Play the man, not the ball kind of thing.

Yeah. I do wonder if he's, I mean, I'm sure part of it is a bit of a performance of like a humorous identity and it's a little bit like what Harriet says in the interview about writing an opinion piece, that sense of a voice and an identity coming through. There's definitely that there.

And I do wonder if Michael Deacon thinks he's doing a kind of, you know, Alan Partridge, this is great banter kind of thing. That's, you know, that maybe Amal Rajan was going to read it and think, oh, this is funny. He's making these digs about me, but it's all in good, you know, it's all.

in good humour. But it does, as Jackie says, it kind of takes away from the substance of what he's actually complaining about, which is actually quite, you know, is a serious issue about class-based discrimination in a major... national broadcaster. I think what's tricky to find here is any sense of a coherent, informed argument, which is something that, you know...

in a good op-ed, I think it comes through clearly. Yeah. I mean, we do get onto an argument, don't we? I mean, most of it is an attack on Amal Rajan personally, isn't it? However, you know, you might take that. But when he gets onto an argument, there's some interesting stuff going on there. So he says, in any case, though, I think it's best if Dave ignores his suggestion for the very simple reason that it's nonsense. Oh, great. So there we have our, you know, there's our wealth.

And, you know, so when he kind of actually starts to present some of these arguments, this is a bit better structured, I think. So he says, for example, you know, uses the adverbial, first of all. today's news presenters are not too posh, quote marks. If Rajan thinks they are, perhaps his older colleagues could tell him how things used to be back in the 1980s when Rajan was at primary school. And you kind of get, I mean, OK, there is an argument there.

It does feel like a little bit saying, well, you think it's bad now? It was really bad years ago, so stop complaining. What was really interesting for the next section is that he goes on to talk about how awful the treatment has been of people with regional accents on the BBC in the past. I don't see how this helps as human. This seems to be...

Worse, he talks about how Susan Ray started reading the news in 1983 and she got hate mail about her Scottish accent. I don't see how that's better. And he literally says, even though it's as crisply immaculate as Miss Jean Brody's, that doesn't help his...

argument people don't like regional accents however intelligible in quote marks they sound and you get this whole kind of I mean this this whole thing about using a past tense to kind of look back at that time and you know in the in the distant and not so distant past

He carries on, he says, snobbery within the industry itself was just as strong. When Kay Burley of Sky News was a teenager in local radio 40 years ago, she overheard a colleague mocking her Wigan accent. The only way she was going to make it in news, she realised sadly, was to get rid of it.

And so all of that about, you know, here's another example of someone else who's mocked and ridiculed. Yeah, who got rid of her accent because that was the only way she could see it getting around it. That's not good. This is all bad. That's not good.

The turning point in Deacon's argument then is when he says, these days, both society and broadcasting are vastly less snobbish. And again, it's the same kind of assertion of opinion.

as fact isn't it these days as well that kind of adverbial kind of taking us into the present then there's there's literally no evidence to support that and you know we wouldn't have to go very far to find people who worked for the bbc you know such as Steph McGovern, who would tell you that actually the amount of abuse that you face with an accent, I mean, hers is a Teesside accent, but the amount of abuse that she faces for her Teesside accent is probably no less than anybody 48.

And, you know, like the other stories we covered, like Alex Scott, Priti Ketel, many others who've been attacked for the way they speak. He finishes that paragraph saying, there is a leader. elitism in broadcasting but it's not about accents it's about education And of course, that's not better. Also, as we've discussed previously, the conflation of accent in education, it has been proven again and again and again and again. And it is that conflation that literally underscores the Amal Rudd.

argument in the first place, which is that it seems to be irrespective of the quality of your education if you speak with what is deemed to be a working class accent. then you are treated as less than by particular institutions. Yeah. And it's a certainty of it all coming from Michael Deacon, isn't it? It's, you know, right from the headline, which he probably didn't write himself, but all the way through.

It's that sense that he's absolutely sure of his own viewpoint. He's asserting his own viewpoint, you know, as you both said, without any kind of support from actual content. But he has essentially constructed a narrative voice and identity that...

that appears to draw on a notional shared identity with the Telegraph readers. And that kind of notional identity is one that supports the use of RP in the BBC, is happy attacking. people who appear to criticize the use of RP in the BBC and would agree with him kind of without little evidence above and beyond his own opinion about it. What's quite nice about some of the responses, and there are lots and lots of responses, both to the...

original Amal Rajan program, but also from the readers of the Telegraph themselves that really support everything that we've said, which is the construction of this Telegraph voice being a very specific one that is absolutely supported by the Telegraph readers.

So we'll come on to that in a second. But also there's some nice pieces from alternative news outlets like The Guardian that have a much more sympathetic view of the Amarajan programme that it's worth having a look at as interesting counterpoints to this Telegraph one. Yeah, and even to be fair to The Telegraph, even their review of the programme itself when it came out in early December, I think, was very positive. They thought there was lots of interesting issues being raised in it.

is maybe this particular writer who's got an issue with him. But yeah, as you say, maybe there is also that sense that that's very representative of a... of a view of the Telegraph itself in other ways. Yeah. So in response to the Michael Deacon article, a couple of readers of the Telegraph wrote in with their opinions in response. The Telegraph have published them under a small headline that says nothing.

elitist about received pronunciation. And of course, long-time listeners of the show or students of English language will know everything about received pronunciation is literally elitist. It is the... overt prestige variety upon which kind of British public life rests. And that is absolutely supported by what we see here. So if you are looking for evidence of this idea of RP as an elite prestige...

variety, then look no further than this letters page. So we have a response on this letters page that says, Sir, received pronunciation is not posh, as the presenter Amal Rajan claims. It is precise, which means anyone can understand it. Making speech accessible to all, it is the very opposite of elitist. Now, this is an argument that we hear a lot in linguistics from sort of as a common sense view.

and I put common sense in kind of inverted commas there. Yeah, so it's this, I mean, it's those carefully chosen adjectives, isn't it? It's precise. And it's accessible. And I think, you know, both of those choices suggest that anything but an RP accent is therefore imprecise.

and not accessible, which I think is ridiculous, really. You know, I watched the programme. I had absolutely no problem understanding Amal Rajan speaking. You're from the North East as well. How could you possibly understand this accent you're using? Once I tune my ears in. The letter goes on with Mr. Roger.

is hard to understand, not because of his accent, but because he gabbles, slurs, and swallows his consonants. Jackie, what do you think about that? Yeah, well, I mean, and there we've got some really nice verb choices, haven't we? Gabble. slurs and swallows and all of those kind of create a representation of somebody with a non-RP accent as somebody who is you know

unintelligible and barely in control of their own mouth. Nearly even human. But yeah, it's sort of animalistic, isn't it? Rapples, slews and swallows. I mean, it's pretty damning. And also... That's literally his accent, as in she's talking about swallowing his consonants. If consonant is about sound production, then she is commenting on his accent. So while she claims for it not to be about his accent, the comments that she's made absolutely are.

And I don't know what she thinks she's talking about if she's not talking about his accent when she makes comments like he gabbles, slurs and swallows his consonants. Yeah, it's exactly the same argument that Lord Digby Jones made when he was having a go at Alex Scott. He said it's not about her accent. And in all of these instances, you know, it is about accent. It's about how people are pronouncing words. And just because you say it's not about accent.

Doesn't mean it is. Doesn't mean that's true. But it's also, but ironically, it's fallacious. The fact is that Amal Rajan is perfectly comprehensible. Like he doesn't slur his words. He doesn't swallow his consonants, whatever that means. I think that might be sort of a veiled reference to sort of the G-dropping that you sometimes get with accents. Really commonly, I might add. I think it's also a bit of a tell.

from all of these people who say it's not about accent, because while A, it is about accent, B, It clearly isn't about accent. It's about the other things these people represent, which might be to do with race, to do in Alex Scott's case, to do with like social class, maybe with Amal Rajan to do with social class as well.

you know, stay educated but went to Oxbridge. But it does seem to be about people who wouldn't otherwise in the past have been in those positions having a voice and those voices being heard and, you know, being the voice of authority in the BBC.

And people who previously occupied those positions without any criticism, they feel now under threat. There's a second letter as well, isn't there? This second letter is a real doozy as well. So again, if you are a student of A-level English language or a teacher is looking for evidence of the supposedly common sense approach. two accent in the UK, then this is maybe the best example of people believing that RP is better.

than other accents. The letter states, when Amal Rajan calls broadcasters posh, he simply means they speak properly. And that notion of propriety or correctness or notional goodness is one that we spend a lot of time at a level trying to unpick with students because it's not inherently true it's an it's an idea that is perpetuated by the fact that

RP carries this overt prestige within the public sphere. And that's, of course, exactly what Amal Rajan is trying to draw attention to. This notional, this accent RP. as a better accent, a more comprehensible accent is nonsensical and actually has, again, real life implications for those who don't speak it. And that is never clearer than the second paragraph of the letter, which goes on to say,

He's right to complain that only 10% of the population speak with received pronunciation. The tragedy, however, is that this figure is not higher. It's ridiculous, isn't it? It is, but almost certainly stands for what I imagine is a large number of the Telegraph readers because they've not only felt strongly enough about it to write in, but has also been published for the other Telegraph readers to read and enjoy.

they seem to get confused about what they're talking about don't they because we get this kind of they start to then talk about if they employ people who use appalling grammar which has got nothing to do with accents or have incomprehensible accents. And again, like Jackie was saying, that's a huge overstatement of somebody not being familiar with an accent. And in this case, you know, again, incomprehensible accents rarely make it onto...

radio, do they? They say this is not snobbery. Anyone can speak the English language as it should be spoken if they make the effort. So this idea of should, that modal verb is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. There's again this...

notion of correctness, that there is a right way to speak and a wrong way to speak. And that RP is the right way and that everything else is the wrong way. And that it all comes down to effort. If you just try hard enough, then you can speak just like these glorious...

speakers of RP. And I really like, we'll obviously put a link to this in the show notes. I really like the graphic that they've put along with this letters page. It's about as old school as you can get. For those of you who can't see the picture, a very buttoned up shirt. kind of old school 1950s black and white picture of someone with a really old microphone, bespectacled, looking very seriously as he reads from his sheaf of papers. There's a whole kind of notional tradition that this...

This prescriptivist idea is drawing on that they're wielding here to support the idea that RP is the way to go and that everything else is trash.

Yeah, and it's this whole idea at the end as well, isn't it? So inverted snobbery on the part of broadcasters who encourage bad English is a national disgrace. And it's just... I guess it's, you know, arguments about the BBC often come back to these things, don't they? Because it's seen as like a national broadcaster. It's tied in with national identity. When you start to talk about national identity.

and language you're into kind of dangerous territory and people you know strong feelings are revoked aren't they yeah and it's also it's also tied into ideas about standards isn't it yeah and i think that's what this comes back to that that for some people, letting go of the RP accent is letting go standards in some way. Letting go of Britain, Jack. Britain is lost. But I think it is a discourse. It is an attitude that is commonly heard.

by lots of people that, you know, I mean, I feel as though I hear it in schools, in the workplace, you know, that somehow a particular way of speaking and a particular accent. is linked to a higher standard and presenting yourself well just as you might you know wear a shiny pair of shoes and a suit. It's this idea that it marks you out as making the effort all better in some way than other people, which I think is very damaging. Yeah.

So there's loads there to explore. We'll link to the article itself, the Michael Deacon article. We'll link to the letters in response. There's loads of other ones as well that are related to this, including... the Sutton Trust report that was done by Accent Bias Britain Project.

loads of the responses to that. There's a huge number of articles and sources around accent bias that we've covered in previous episodes, but particularly related to this. There were loads of stories about Amal Rajan's initial kind of conversations he'd had.

the programme itself. And there's probably a lot more in the article to explore. I mean, we've kind of, we've gone into detail in some bits of it, but scratch the surface on other parts of it. There's lots you could look at with this. And I think, you know, when you look at these as a, you know, the letters and the article is like a... almost like a sort of pair of texts for paper two, section B, it would be a good language discourses task.

tie it all in together with the Harriet Williamson stuff as well, where you've got how you actually write a piece yourself. And you might kind of think about, you know, if you were writing a response to some of the issues and ideas raised in the Michael Deacon piece and in the letters.

What would those ideas be? Where would you take them? Where would you go with them? What are those ideas and what do you know about them from language study that you could challenge, you could critique, you could take a bit further, you could develop more? There's lots there that would fit together.

you know you can explore a lot of that yourselves So we're very pleased on this episode of Lexis to welcome Harriet Williamson, who is Voices Commissioning Editor at The Independent.

So welcome, Harriet. Thanks for joining us. Thank you so much for inviting me here today, Dan. I'm really excited. We don't normally talk to people other than linguists and kind of language experts. So we were quite keen to have somebody like you who is well knows journalism inside out but also particularly on the kind of opinion side of things and as we were saying just before we started recording students on the a level have to write an opinion piece as part of their exam

And they have to look at lots of opinion pieces as well. So we're quite keen for your sort of insights about what makes a good one, how you can sort of approach that writing, editing them. the sort of ingredients of good opinion pieces. So that's kind of part of what we want to talk to you about as well. Hope I can be helpful today. I'm sure you will. Okay, so first question.

is your role at The Independent has got the title Voices Commissioning Editor. So what does that involve and what does your normal working week consist of? So I am one of two editors on Voices, which is the Independent's opinion section. I'm the junior.

editor my amazing manager and head of desk is Victoria Richards my working week consists of basically editing all the copy that comes our way we do it between us these will be the columns of our regular columnists and freelancers editing them to a really high standard that's in keeping with the publication's house style and that just means that all different newspapers have different rules about how things are presented in copy so you'll notice that

in some publications they cap up the word parliament but we do not and it's all little rules like that that just keep the paper looking consistent and I also commission on a range of trending topics usually looking at the news

first thing in the morning and then seeing what we're going to run with throughout the day. What are the big stories? What do we want to cover? What can we get our in-house columnists writing on? What do we need to commission out? And I also do timely quick writes. For example, last week I did... Richard Madeley's disastrous interview with Lynch. And I also wrote about Daniel Craig's comments.

on his Knives Out character being gay. Yeah. And I also plan an execute series that we run on Voices. The most recent one that's running at the moment is Beyond Brexit, where we look at what life is like in the UK after Brexit. edited, and fully took responsibility for all of our Black History Month coverage, which ran throughout October. Yeah. I also run The Voice's Twitter.

when I'm on shift, which is sometimes lovely and sometimes a bin fire. So when you say that you do the quick write, how...

How quick do you have to be? So I aim to write 600 to 800 words in an hour. And because I am. on staff i will build the piece within our cms system so our content management and that means putting in the headline putting in the stand first sourcing images and video putting it all together so it will look right on the digital page when people are viewing it

And then it goes through an editing process with Victoria. It goes to legal in case there are any legal issues. And then it will be published and out in the world, promoted, put on our home pages. And then across social media. That's quite a difference. Our students need to write 750 words for their coursework and it can take months. Well, sometimes I wish I did have months.

Yeah. The time constraints can be difficult, but you really do learn to roll with it. And sometimes I think that you get the best stuff out quickly. Although there have been other pieces where I thought, you know, if I'd had... Another couple of hours, I could have gone into different areas or brought more themes into it, referred to other things that I maybe wanted to bring in. But, you know, we do the absolute best with the resources that we've got. And I think opinions...

they are reactive and the news requires speed because it's changing. There's always a new big story. It never stops. Is that sort of driven by social media, do you think, to some extent? I think to some extent it is, but, you know. this morning we've had the ruling on Rwanda so we had to get a reactive piece out on that and

We've got it out within an hour. But I think that's amazing. And that's one of our regular columnists, the fantastic Sean O'Grady, who is so versatile and so quick and so clever. He really puts me to shame. So you've got the you've got the kind of quick rights, but also.

the kind of longer term sort of picture of like thematic stuff so you said about like black history month you said about the kind of after brexit beyond brexit and yeah a lot of a lot more planning goes into those series and people are usually given a a bigger time frame in which to put those together so

For Black History Month, I wanted to get as many amazing Black creatives, sports people, television personalities, Black academics and historians. I wanted to get just a breadth of amazing Black excellence writing voices. So I had quite a bit of time to set that up and I'm really pleased with the end result.

What was your sort of pathway into this job then? And what sort of advice might you give to A-level English students who are looking at getting into journalism? Well, I probably wouldn't advise my path, which was quite meandering, I'd say, because I don't know.

hadn't decided that I fancied doing journalism until I was actually in my English literature MA. So I've got an English lit BA and MA and while I was doing the MA I saw that a paper was running columns opinion columns actually by somebody that I knew from my hometown and I was like right I could definitely do that if they're doing that. So I started pitching and I freelanced for years, basically trying to break into the industry. I couldn't afford to intern for free.

for any meaningful length of time in London, because I'm not from London, I don't have parents there, and I don't have family that could pay for me to live there while I was doing it, which is definitely a route in for some people in journalism. worked and I pitched and then I finally got offered a job in journalism in London and I uprooted myself and my partner from Manchester and then we came and here we are and it's really expensive.

People told me, but I didn't believe them. But in terms of advice I'd give, I see a lot of people going through the route of doing a journalism MA after their first degree. And that seems to be a really great route for people. But building up a portfolio of writing that you've done is really important. publications that you can write and that you have a strong news sense you know what sort of topics are

not just being covered, but also that you can add your own USP to, so your own unique value, what makes you the right person to write this story. That's the sort of thing that you need to be getting across to editors in the pitching process. We receive hundreds and hundreds of...

pitching emails every day and to make them stand out I would always put pitch in caps in the subject line and a snappy suggested headline you want to grab the editor who is obviously going to be very busy you want to grab their attention straight away why are you the right person to write this and very briefly what are you going to say

how quickly you can turn it around. And then if they accept, you can talk about things like fee and what their preferred timescale is. So getting, actually encouraging students to get writing is probably good advice, isn't it?

Yeah, definitely. And not just writing, but reading. I really do believe you can't be a good writer if you're not a good reader. If you don't read a lot, I just suggest reading as much as possible and reading widely across papers, following journalists, the work of journalists that you admire.

like columnists at publications I was always a massive fan of Owen Jones and I read his columns from being like at uni and I was a bit of a fangirl but honestly people like that have really influenced my own writing and my career so

No, he's an interesting one, isn't he? Because, I mean, he's got quite a large output over the years, hasn't he? Yeah, massive. And he's written three books and he's got his YouTube channel now. Yes, I've not been on that. I've got Chavso, which I need to go back to because that was great. That's a fantastic book. And it felt like it was something that people weren't saying at the time.

It was really important. It was really timely. And we'd gone through all those years of like Little Britain and Benefit Street. And it really was the demonization of the working class. And Owen just stood up and said it. and wrote a book about it, which always helps. I think I definitely have got to the point that I'm at now faster had I lived in London from the outset or, I don't know, done the journalism MA. A lot of people go to City. I hear that's a really good university for it.

You know, everybody's route is different. I don't know. I wouldn't want everyone's journey to look the same. I'm really grateful for the other jobs I've worked in, everything from humanitarian charity work, doing copywriting for that, to... making burgers and hot dogs in a vegan restaurant, that's all so valuable. And I think you get something from that that you don't if you've been in journalism all your life, basically.

And one of the subjects that's really important to me as an editor is poverty and the benefit system. And part of that is from being on Universal Credit for quite a few years to top up my income. So I've seen firsthand how the benefit system works. And I mean, you could... There's an easy argument to make that lots of, I won't name any economists, but lots of them have been born into wealth and will never know anything about that yet. Quite happy to pontificate about it in national newspapers.

Yeah, well, there is obviously so much evidence points to journalism still being dominated by people from quite privileged backgrounds. And I think that that's something that you definitely can't.

deny and does deserve to be talked about and we recognize that and when I'm commissioning on voices I do take that into consideration in terms of wanting to get people from different backgrounds who and voices that might not or otherwise be represented to lift up those people and allow them to tell their story yeah and I guess it's probably good not to be too pessimistic about it as well because you want to encourage

exactly those people to get into journalism rather than say look it's that everything's loaded against you don't do it do something else even if it is all loaded against you you can still break through and that makes it all the sweeter when you do yeah it's good

And you're the living proof, Harriet. Do you feel as though, do young people have to go to London to get into journalism? Do you think there are any more kind of, you know, are there any other regions that might cater for that kind of career aspiration?

Well, in terms of local papers, I don't have any experience on them. So I don't really feel like I can speak to that. Obviously, you need to be where the action's happening. So if you're writing for a local paper on the news section, you need to be in that place. But even...

I remember interning, doing like a week's worth experience with the Guardian's Northern office in Manchester. Right, yeah. They only had... two full-time journalists there and that's the whole of the north right okay and that's a paper that's you know started in manchester wasn't it and it's got a reputation for being fairly good at northern coverage yeah i think that The fact that it is so London-centric is probably something that I'd like to see change in journalism because London, although...

It's where Westminster is, etc. It really is not the centre of the universe for everything. The rest of the UK matters as well.

Okay, so when you're looking at the opinion pieces that you publish, what would you say might be the key ingredients of the best ones from your point of view? So for our best opinion pieces, I look for a strong opinion line. Always. This is not a feature and it's not a news story. These have a persuasive argument that's backed up by facts and hooked to a recent news story or current events.

The best writers have their own voice that's recognisable. For example, you can tell a piece written by our political sketch writer Tom Peck without even seeing his byline because his style is so distinctive. You get it straight away. Being engaging, having some personality in there. There's a lot more flexibility and freedom, I think, with opinion pieces compared to news or feature writing.

which is something that's really nice about it. So, I mean, I think our students, sometimes they're moving from kind of a really kind of academic register. And when we suddenly expect them to write an opinion piece.

they find the switch from one to another quite difficult. So in terms of when you say personality, how does that come through in the pieces that you read? In the pieces that I read and edit, the personality comes through in terms of imagery. It's about... sentence structure it's about how you write metaphors I encourage people to be funny maybe not every subject is that's appropriate for but a little bit of levity humor something that's incisive sharp

biting, insightful. We want to hear your voice. That's why we're called Voices. Great.

Could you give us maybe a couple of examples of the favourite pieces that you've either written yourself or published and what it is that makes them work? Okay, so for one of my favourite pieces, I'm going to mention Victoria Richards, who is the... voices editor she's head of our desk we're a small team of two and she wrote an amazing and heartfelt piece about why the language we use around refugees and migrants really matters and this was off the back of swella braverman

calling migrants an invasion just a day before there was a firebomb attack at the Border Force Immigration Centre in Dover. And this piece, it works so perfectly because she... She starts by talking about the words that are commonly used to describe disasters, acts of war and vermin, except that our politicians are using them to refer to human beings. And it brings it, it's so powerful, it brings it right down.

to the language and why it matters. And she ends her piece with a poem by Wasson Shire called Home, which I just think is absolutely beautiful. In terms of my own favourite that I've written, I think it's probably the piece that you got me on the show because I wrote about accent bias and it was pegged to some new research that found that people in the North...

and the Midlands are much more likely to worry that their accents are going to count against them in terms of higher education or employment. So people... have come back and said that their accents have been made fun of or criticised at work or singled out or mocked in social situations and I talked about my own experiences of being somebody from the East Mids in London but everyone thinks that you're Northern because

Everything about Watford is the North, apparently. And I thought that I had the right sort of mix of humour and then talking about issues of class and privilege across different industries, including journalism and this sort of... I don't know, this sort of false belief, I guess, that people who speak with received pronunciation, RP, or like...

Another way of putting that, I guess, is like BBC English, like newsreaders and stuff. If you've got a Southern accent, you're immediately thought to be more clever, more knowledgeable, more successful. Whereas I just think that... people are adding extra r's to words that don't need them nobody needs an r in batch and putting like little stories from my own life in there i think is quite it's quite good for the reader because it just it takes the point around it makes it personal

anecdotes do work in opinion pieces I remember doing a couple of days work experience at the Sunday Times which was in Southwark at the time and I pronounced it Southwark and the whole office laughed at me I'll never forget it. Honestly, it's indelibly seared into my consciousness.

It's just me. It's those anecdotes that kind of really humanize a piece. And I always feel as though for opinion pieces, you need to feel like you have a relationship with you. with your reader and I don't know do you have an idea of who your reader might be when you're writing do you kind of envisage somebody or does it not work like that for you I'm not sure it really 100% works like that for me because I think we have a very broad

readership across and and also we have an international readership we have a big office in the US so we know we've got a lot of US readers we've got an India office and we know that people so across continents are reading the independence copy and that I was going to also mention that when you're writing an opinion piece, it's best not to assume that your reader is already familiar with the topic.

don't always know where they're coming from or what knowledge or experience they have going into reading it and the worst thing you can do really is alienate them by not explaining yourself that turns people off very quickly yeah yeah i do have sort of an idea about who our readers are because we run a letters page every day and that means picking letters out of our inbox and when I write the editor's letter every Sunday that's another thing that we do five days a week.

No, seven days a week. We always do the editor's letter. What am I thinking? The premium section will be very cross to here. I do not know which days the editor's letter comes down. Sometimes I look to our letters inbox and I see the issues that people are... interested in what's getting people passionate this week what are people talking about i think that's fascinating to know what is so sparking a reader's interest that they will get an email open and write into us

Yeah. So it is kind of a dialogue, isn't it, really? I mean, you never get to talk to these people face to face, but you are engaged in a kind of a huge conversation between yourselves and your readers.

Yeah, that's a really nice way to look at it. And we're obviously, Victoria and I are very responsive on Twitter. And we also write the Voices Dispatches newsletter that gets sent straight to inboxes of everyone who's subscribed. We've got a lot of subscribers. Don't quote me on the figures. I can't remember, but it is.

So I hear that comes out every Saturday and it has a roundup of our best articles of the week, plus a longer section on what the big story of the last seven days has been and how we've covered it. So just moving on to sort of language in the news, I suppose. We sort of complained a bit on this podcast, and lots of linguists do as well, that there's lots of language coverage in the UK media.

there's actually quite a kind of low level of general language education so I mean maybe that goes back to things like you know the GCSE not having very much language study as part of it and it's mostly about kind of

reading old articles or reading 19th century literature. But there's lots of people who will have opinions about language, like about accents. They'll think that some accents are kind of lazy or better, that kind of stuff. What role do you think... the media has particularly the kind of work that you're involved in in improving people's understanding of how language actually works well on the most basic level we

have a responsibility to put out clean and correct copy which of course when you're under massive time pressure but all our editors at the indie are excellent and we also have a team of sub-editors who pick up when things are missed during the first editing process but wider than that in terms of the language we use there are certain words that we would avoid in

in in our copy so things like a car crash interview we would never say that when we're reporting suicide it always goes through samaritan guidelines so we would never say that somebody committed suicide because that implies that a crime has taken place when we are talking about small people boats coming to the uk across the channel you need to be careful how you refer to these people in terms of migrants asylum seekers refugees

In copy, I would never allow something to go out on voices that called people on benefits scroungers or cheats, anything like that. It just wouldn't be appropriate. And I think it's deeply damaging and unfair. The paper that I'm with, I'm really proud to work for. There are decisions that are made that reflect the values of the organisation and the Independent has really strong values about upholding human rights and championing liberal values and standing up for the oppressed.

in the face of oppression basically which is something that makes me it helps me get up in the morning yeah yes and that that really is to do with language and the importance of the the word choices that we make and then put out into the world i think there's a massive responsibility there and it is clear that that you have a particular stance and i suppose that

From our point of view, from A-level teachers' point of view, you can take the same story and look at it in different newspapers and see, you know. kind of deliberate representations of groups of people or of you know sectors of society and see how one or two small word choices can create a very different representation yeah

That is absolutely fascinating. And if it's something that is shown to young people, it's much easier for them to start picking up on that and noticing it and not taking, I don't know, words in. papers as absolute gospel things can be represented in completely different ways and it's also about which stories are being told yeah yeah and who is being allowed to tell them which is an important part of voices

That's really interesting as well, isn't it? Because I think the point about the language choices, you know, vocabulary, things like that. there's there's also that bigger level isn't there with language where we sometimes sort of forget we a lot of the time maybe it's just my sort of nerdy teaching but zooming in on a few particular words and think oh that word's really important if you change it what will happen but then like you say that bigger picture

of who actually is allowed to tell stories, the whole framing of it. That's huge as well, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, this is probably quite an obvious example, but Harry and Meghan on Netflix. needs to write about the angle of racism there we are not going to commission a white person it needs to be a black writer yeah story a hundred percent yeah

So finally, then, as we've said, our A-level English language students have to write opinion pieces about language as part of their course. So would you be able to give them any advice about the style? the structure and the voices that they create. And how do you manage to inform people about things that they might not know too much about, whilst also balancing the need to be entertaining and engaging at the same time?

That's a great question. You know, if what you've been doing and what you're quite deep in at the moment is writing academic essays, an opinion column is an opportunity to have a bit more fun. And I don't encourage... academic writing for op-eds even from professors I will soften some of the language I will I need this to be engaging and I need it to be accessible to readers um it's obviously it's not a university essay and you don't want to put anybody off

Opinion pieces are quite different from news stories too, even though they are usually hooked to them. I always make sure to briefly summarise, even if it's within a sentence, the event or research that I'm referring to, the thing that the whole opinion piece is pegged on.

while ensuring that I have an argument thread that can be used throughout the piece. I find that a mixture of sentence structures and lengths makes the piece more engaging, as does language that invokes imagery. Have the facts at your fingertips and do... Well, I guess this doesn't... apply to a university essay but link to them linked yeah allow the readers to go off and do further reading right

particularly if you've got a tight word count between six and 800. The other thing that I'd definitely say is that your voice is your own and an opinion piece can definitely be more creative and flexible than a new, in my opinion anyway.

feature writers probably get angry here than a news or feature article yeah allow your voice to shine through be creative use metaphors use imagery but bring it back to your main thread of argument that runs throughout what are you trying to persuade the breeder of what do you want to them to come away knowing or feeling or having changed their opinion on

Yeah. You can change people's minds in an opinion piece. It's got incredible power. Yeah. It sounds like really good advice, that idea about having that clip. clear message which I think sometimes when we certainly when we look at the sort of stuff that students write in exams and what we see our own students do and we kind of think well you've used all this kind of nice voice and you've got you've made it engaging but what's your actual point

You've got to have your voice. You can have me right from a starting headline and that does help in terms of keeping you on track because you know what you want to say going in and you know how it's going to be presented on the page and the headline is the first thing people look at. Yeah.

yeah and when you think about those different parts that you've got on the page like you know the headline the stand first the pull quotes like a caption choice of image those sort of things i mean what do you when you're writing your own one presumably You've got all that in your own mind, haven't you? Yes. Yeah. And I know I'm going to be building it myself. So I've got something in my head about how it's going to look and what I want the readers to.

to see when they first click or when they're straight on the homepage, what is the thumbnail image they're going to see for the hero. We have a longer headline when you click into the article and a shorter one for the homepage. Yeah. which can be a little bit more teasy to draw people in. But we do try to avoid anything that's overtly clickbait. Yeah, yeah. Can I just ask them, in terms of voice?

How open would you be as an editor to hearing voices that aren't kind of expressed in standard English? Would that be something that would be? accepted you know within the independent or would that still be something that you think well no if we're publishing in

a newspaper, it's got to be standard English. What would you count as not standard English? So if people were using kind of dialect terms or if their voices were... Well, let's go with... dialect for example so if i used like i don't know a phrase that's specific to a particular community or region in the uk yeah yeah that would be perfectly acceptable as long as it was explained yeah so that it was

accessible to a wider audience yeah or it was linked out to so people could then go and see what it means i'm trying to think of i can't remember who it was but somebody wrote it was a about accent and dialect and the the title was there's no wrong with it was Stan Carey

and it was talking about this there's now wrong with dialect and and something about broadcast slang wasn't it yeah i think katie edwards did one for the independent and it was that deliberate use of dialect because it was a piece about dialect and it wasn't kind of glossed because I've never heard of broadcast before I have no idea what that means I mean I'll say there's no wrong with that all the time as will I coming from my mum's Yorkshire side of the family yeah

Yeah, I really don't see a problem with that. And I don't think that we would edit it out as long as it... And also, it opens up a new avenue of exploration for the reader. It's more education. Yeah. You said you hadn't heard of that slang term before. Now you know what it means. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's great.

I was just thinking about another one as well that just sprang to mind. There was, I think I've just looked it up. It's Nick S. Shukla in the Guardian opinion pages quite a while ago now, about eight or nine years ago. And he starts, he's talking about multicultural London English. And his article starts saying the East End done changed blood. All the Cockneys moved out. They decided that the only way was Essex and they dusted. They left their end, taking their rhyming slang with them.

and it's you know it's good because it's kind of it's a you know it's a good representation of the voice he's talking about in in the article And it's wonderfully lyrical as well. I think there's a lot of beauty in dialect, in slang, in regional accents, in different phrases that you collect from different parts of your family depending on where they're from. Do you reckon the style...

the style guide for the independent is flexible enough to kind of cope with that kind of stuff? Yes, I think all of our style... team are perfectly flexible and open to suggestions and we have lots of interesting conversations about how swear words words should be starred out every day right right and so what what what is your position then at the independent we we star most but leave letters in so you can tell okay what the word is supposed to say

For the app, most are left uncensored. Right. There's a difference between the mobile site and desktop and then the app. You can put it onto your phone. Yeah, which is super interesting. I find all the style decisions absolutely fascinating, but I guess that's just the nerd in me coming through. It's interesting what those decisions are compared to other papers, isn't it, as well?

You know, versus The Times or The Guardian or New Statesman or whatever. Yeah, and I think that it does give you paper a certain personality. So what's your current favourite book, just generally? my current favorite book generally i'm going to pick 16 books and within one series it's a fantasy series written by robin hobb called the realm of the elderlings and the adventures of fits and the fall and

Fitz's Wolf Night Eyes are, I don't know, it's been such a joy to get through all of those. 16 books. 15 books is a commitment, but it's so worth it. I highly recommend. Right. We normally have people saying, well, I can't decide. Can I have two? And you've gone for 16. 16, yeah. I had to submit it somehow. That's great.

Oh, the second one's tricky, isn't it? Yeah. Do you have a favourite kind of linguistic or language fact or idea that you want to share with us? So a linguistic fact that I learned recently. that I thought was really interesting and also put me to shame a little bit. There are words that we use often, if not constantly, even though they don't add any meaning or value to sentences. And they're called crutch words. And I thought, OMG.

every two sentences and i've now realized it's a crutch word and it's meaningless and i need to stop doing it like is another example you know people who drop like okay Well, yeah, I mean, I don't know, you might have some linguists offering a different kind of perspective on that and thinking about...

I mean, we've certainly talked about like a lot, haven't we, Dan? And how it can be really beneficial for speakers. And probably what you're doing, Harriet, is because you're engaged in spontaneous discourse, you have... you know your brain doesn't always keep up with with you and you've got to use words that kind of hold your your place hold your turn and maybe for you

That's what those words are doing. I'd never considered that at all. And I need to now listen to every single episode of this podcast I've ever created. We've written whole articles about the word like that we can share with you. And you've made me feel so much better about my crutch words. Yeah, don't you worry about it, Harriet. It's perfectly normal and natural. No, everyone needs a crutch word. Mine sadly is swearing most of the time.

Oh, yeah. Well, apparently wearing is beneficial, too, because it allows you to release anger in a way that is, I don't know, healthy. Definitely. I want to do one more language. Yeah, yeah. OK, so. Apparently there is a theory that all humans are born with a language acquisition device, which means we're already primed to develop and understand language, which I think is so cool.

And that comes from Noam Chomsky, who is a very important linguist. Yes, that's a big part of the A-level, that one. You've hit on something that students will be looking at. Right, last one. What one bit of advice would you give to a budding, and we normally say linguist, could we say like writer, journalist here instead?

Yes, you may. Read everything you can get your hands on. Pick your favourite opinion writers. Follow them closely. Read everything that they do. Think about what you want to offer to the world if you go into journalism. What gap are you filling? Who do you want to be? Who do you admire? What hole in the market is there already? Who's not being listened to? Could you be that person? Could you lift up those people?

Yes. I thought I'd have a really... Maybe you need a Warsonshire poem just to finish off there, Harriet. Maybe I needed a crutch word, Jack. That would have been the greatest payoff. No, that's great. Thank you very much. there's so much good stuff in there thank you harriet that's really great thank you so much for having me here today