Journalism

‘With’ is not a fucking conjunction

In journalistic writing, ‘with’ is threatening to become the only connector in town. Whatever happened to good old ‘and’?

Every pedant has a pet hate. Whether it’s Oxford commas, Americanisms, lost participles or absent apostrophes, every armchair grammarian has one particular slip that grinds their gears. Several leagues clear at the top of my shit list is “with”.

Firefighters are battling to contain a massive blaze moving “like lightning” on the outskirts of Athens, with authorities evacuating people from towns, villages and hospitals as flames rip through trees, homes and cars.

OK, you say, it might not be exactly how I would have phrased it, but it hardly merits a pop-eyed 2,000-word blog post. Does it?

Well, let’s take a look at what’s going on here. The writer of the offending passage is trying to convey two pieces of information in one sentence. One, that firefighters are tackling a serious wildfire near Athens; two, that people have been evacuated from the area. So they’ve written two separate clauses, and joined them. With “with”.

Now English has a class of words designed to perform exactly this function. They’re called conjunctions. You know: “and”, “but”, “when”, “because”, and all those other linking words. My problem is that “with” does not fucking number among them.

In any dictionary you care to check, “with” is listed as a preposition: a word that shows direction, location, or time, or some similar figurative sense. Off my rocker. Up the wall. At my wits’ end. Even when erroneously pressed into service as above, with is still a preposition. You can tell because it still wants to behave like one.

The Austrians urged their EU counterparts to continue the effort to stamp out the tragedy in the Mediterranean, with more than 2,000 people suffocating or drowning last year.

While conjunctions will happily segue into full clauses (I read the paper and my jaw dropped), prepositions can only take nouns* as an object. That’s why the verbs in the sentences above suddenly have -ing at the end: the writer has, probably without realising, had to turn “suffocate” and “drown” into participles — verbs that act as adjectives by modifying the preceding noun — in order to meet the grammatical demands of “with”.

(*Technically noun phrases, but now is not the time to get bogged down in technicallies.)

Even so, my imagined detractors cry, this is hardly the most heinous of crimes. Why should we care?

For five reasons.

1) Eww

Rowley became commissioner in September 2022, having retired in 2018 after a career in several forces, with him first joining the Met in 2011 as an assistant commissioner.

This reporter has tried to squeeze three pieces of related information into one sentence, which is a perfectly respectable and achievable aim, but sheesh, couldn’t they have done so with a little panache?

As well as the usual grammatical contortions, they’ve ended up with three different verb forms and had to refer to the subject twice in the space of a few words (“Rowley” and “him”). Wouldn’t something like this be simpler and clearer?

Rowley became commissioner in September 2022, having joined the Met in 2011 as assistant commissioner, served in several forces, and retired in 2018.

2) Huh?

The prime minister has already pledged to establish closer ties with the EU, with the new minister for European relations, Nick Thomas-Symonds, travelling to Brussels for an introductory meeting with Brexit negotiator Maros Sefcovic on Monday.

This article was published on a Friday. The grammatical whims of “with” have denied us some important information: the tense of the subordinate clause. Did Thomas-Symonds go to Brussels last Monday, or is he going next Monday?

> Following the prime minister’s pledge to establish closer ties with the EU, the new minister for European relations, Nick Thomas-Symonds, will travel to Brussels for an introductory meeting with Brexit negotiator Maros Sefcovic on Monday.

3) Shrug

Holly Willoughby leaves ITV with questions to answer over Phillip Schofield lying

Hold on. Does Holly Willoughby have questions to answer? Does ITV? Or are these questions anyone can take? Has some action by Holly Willoughby led to questions being asked of ITV? A year later, I’m still not 100% sure what this Sunday Times headline was getting at.

With is a busy little word bee. Even though it’s only a preposition and not a fucking conjunction, it’s the 15th most commonly used word in the English language (according to the Oxford English Corpus) and the OED lists 96 separate meanings for it.

These myriad functions are already a common cause of confusion; consider the sentence “I shot with the man with the gun”, and why this regular column in the Guardian is the only one that has a comma.

With is already buckling under the strain of its multiple duties. Surely it makes no sense to add to them?

4) Grrr

One of the oddest things about this linguistic oddity is that it’s almost entirely unique to journalists. Barring a few instances that have leaked into the real world, you’ll never find “with” moonlighting as a conjunction in novels or poems or everyday speech.

There’s a word for language that’s unique to one class of people: jargon. Jargon marks out a group as special and, whether intentionally or not, alienates non-members. Which is fine when that group are specialists, like engineers or soldiers or gamers, talking mostly among themselves.

But journalism is all about conveying information to the wider world. It should be intelligible to as many people as possible. To use forms that are alien to the reader is to throw up walls in an arena that should be wall-less.

(The phenomenon may, incidentally, have been born from good intentions. Because the best reporting is neutral, eschewing value judgments, loaded terms and assumptions of guilt and causation, and because exact sequences of events are not always immediately known, it’s not always appropriate to use more specific connectors like “because” or “after”. This leaves us with bland old “and”, which can quickly become repetitive.)

5) Aaarrrrgghhhhh

If “with” was occasionally being wheeled out in an innocuous attempt to stave off monotony, then yes, I’d still be swearing, just not publicly.

But it’s everywhere. You’ll struggle to find a news (or especially business or media) story without at least one conscripted “with”. While subediting, I’ve come across as many as three in one paragraph. Sometimes it feels as if “and” has become an ex-conjunction.

Fortunately, other connectors are available.

Sometimes the meaningful conjunctions, like when, because or amid, are perfectly fine. Sometimes a pronoun like “which” or “who” will do the trick. Simply dropping the “with” and running with the participial form is another option, as are semicolons and full stops.

There will no doubt be some diehard descriptivists out there who can reel off a string of sentences by giants of literature using “with” as a fucking conjunction. All I have to say to you is: they could have done better.

Here are some examples I’ve come across in recent years, and suggested improvements.

The rear door of a restaurant in Ormeau Road was also kicked in, with racial slurs shouted at the workers inside.

> The rear door of a restaurant in Ormeau Road was also kicked in, and racial slurs were shouted at the workers inside.

As of Saturday, 779 people had been arrested in connection with the riots, with 349 of those charged, according to the National Police Chiefs’ Council.

> As of Saturday, 779 people had been arrested in connection with the riots, 349 of whom had been charged, according to the National Police Chiefs’ Council.

The tone was set by Boris Johnson, with the British prime minister opening the Cop26 talks with a stark warning …

Oh, come on.

> The tone was set by Boris Johnson, who opened the Cop26 talks with a stark warning …

The left-back was a free agent after leaving Tottenham, with the north Londoners having paid around £25m to buy him from Fulham in 2019.

> The left-back was a free agent after leaving Tottenham, who had paid Fulham around £25m for him in 2019.

ONS data showed a strong performance in the second quarter, with the service sector helping drive growth.

> ONS data showed a strong performance in the second quarter, driven partly by the service sector.

The EPC is designed to facilitate the strengthening of ties between EU and non-EU leaders in an informal setting, with previous conferences held in Spain, Moldova and the Czech Republic.

> The EPC, which has previously held conferences in Spain, Moldova and the Czech Republic, is designed to facilitate the strengthening of ties between EU and non-EU leaders in an informal setting.

With brands the driving force behind the industry’s growth, they account for £1bn of sales and 2.5bn bottles.

> Brands are the driving force behind the industry’s growth, accounting for £1bn of sales and 2.5bn bottles.

Sales of no- and low-alcohol beer are seeing a summer surge, with brewers boosting production to meet growing demand.

> Brewers are boosting production of no- and low-alcohol beer after a summer surge in sales.

Freer’s comments come 10 years after the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act achieved royal assent on 17 July 2013, allowing same-sex couples to marry and convert civil partnerships into marriage, with Freer converting his civil partnership with Angelo Crolla to marriage in 2015.

> Freer’s comments come 10 years after the Marriage Act, which allows same-sex couples to marry and convert civil partnerships into marriage, achieved royal assent on 17 July 2013. Freer converted his civil partnership with Angelo Crolla to marriage in 2015.

Ministers have said they want to tighten the law on glorifying terrorism, with the conduct of a minority of people on the pro-Palestine demonstrations in recent weeks, including the chanting of the controversial slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, prompted pledges of change.

(Here, it’s been so long since “with” wrote its unwieldy grammar cheque, the reporter’s forgotten to cash it.)

> Ministers have said they want to tighten the law on glorifying terrorism, a pledge prompted by the conduct of a minority of people …

The typical London rent also hit a new high of £2,633, with average costs in the capital now 5.3% higher than 12 months earlier.

The cack-handed use of “with” here has forced the writer to use not just London and a synonym for London in the same sentence, but also typical rent and a synonym for typical rent! Isn’t “Average London rents hit a new high of £2,600, 5.3% higher than 12 months earlier” less annoying to read?

A desert planet is also featured prominently, with comparisons between Tattooine and Arrakis able to be drawn thanks to their basic geography.

> Tattooine and Arrakis are both desert planets.

The majority of reviewers gave Dune: Part Two a 10-star rating, with only five reviews ranking it below five stars, with many complimenting its blend of “visual splendor and narrative depth.”

> I’m actually shaking too much to attempt this one.

The cost of borrowing has soared in the past two years with retail businesses finding it particularly difficult to raise debt amid concerns about consumer spending amid a surge in the cost of essentials such as food and energy bills.

> [bleep] [bleep] [bleep] [bleep] [bleeeeeeeeeeep]

The mountainness of this molehill is not so much that “with” as a clause connector is flat out wrong and should never be allowed — although it is, and it shouldn’t, because it’s not a fucking conjunction — but that it’s clumsy and lazy and vague, that it’s already doing more than its fair share of jobs in English, and that there are countless ways of producing the same effect with none of these drawbacks.

Language changes! some will say. Keep up, you old duffer! Well, yes, it does, but the changes that stick are generally for the better, offering some nuance or functionality that wasn’t there before. This one blows from every angle.

Journalists: dispense with ‘with’ with immediate effect

The number of people obtaining their news from decent news sites is falling off a cliff. Moreover, their visits are getting shorter; the average time spent reading a news article on the Guardian website (and, I’m sure, on all the others) is less than a minute.

The reasons mooted for this include increased competition and dwindling attention spans driven by instant-gratification culture. But I propose a further cause: a drop in quality.

To an extent, this was bound to happen. Newspapers have far fewer resources than they used to, having lost much of their advertising revenue to the internet, and the all-consuming need for speed means there’s less time for primping. But lazy, confusing, repetitive, cut-and-paste prose is not the magic bullet that will bring the readers swarming back.

Should you write? The fag-packet verdict

How do you become a successful writer? There’s enough advice out there on the subject to fill Tony Blair’s property portfolio, so I thought I’d kick off my new blog by tackling a different question: whether you should bother at all.

Clearly, a lot of people are considering it. In a YouGov poll last year that asked 14,000 people what job they would most like to do, author finished top by some distance, beating out Hollywood movie star, Formula One driver and astronaut. Fully 60% of those surveyed said that they would like to spend the bulk of their adult years alone, stuck behind a desk, torturing themselves for falling short of their 1,000-word target.

The literary life seems to me to have three main attractions. First, the bar to entry is low – no special training is required, and all you need to get started is a laptop and some fingers, which you probably had anyway. Second, the potential rewards are enormous. Even now, whenever I read the word “writer”, the image that springs to mind is of JK Rowling or John Grisham, rising momentarily from from their throne of cash to flick a duster over their bulging awards cabinet. And third, the lifestyle is appealing: satisfying work, you get to be your own boss, work where you want, etc.

The trouble, as I have realised after half a lifetime slaving over a hot keyboard, is that all these attractions are illusory.

(I’m aware that there are many different kinds of writing, but for the purposes of this post I’m going to focus on two of the most popular, which happen to be the ones I know the most about: book publishing and journalism.)

Firstly, while the bar to entry for writing is low, the bar to success is stratospheric. And there’s one reason for that: the competition. Because, as we’ve seen, you’re not the only one who wants to make a living from the pen. Reliable statistics aren’t easy to come by, and some of the calculations below would probably disgrace the back of a fag packet, but they should give you a flavour.

Last year, according to the Office for National Statistics, the number of people in the UK employed as authors, writers or translators was 77,000 (half of whom worked part-time). Strip out the translators, screenwriters, playwrights, speechwriters, technical writers, video game writers, the fashion bloggers, food bloggers and mummy bloggers, and that leaves you with 25,000 Brits tops earning their crust from writing fiction and nonfiction books.

Now, how many people are fighting for those spots? It’s going to be a tad less than the 60% of the population revealed in the YouGov survey, because most of them will never put pen to paper. For my first attempt at ballpark figure, I looked to the blogosphere. It’s safe to say that few bloggers would turn up their noses at the prospect of earning a living from writing, and if they’re organised enough to set up an online presence, they’ve probably got the wherewithal to finish a book.

Most estimates of the number of blogs in the world are near the 200 million mark, of which 7% are UK-based, which would give us 14 million Britblogs. That strikes me as a little high, although someone put the figure at 2.5 million way back in July 2005. Let’s err on the low side, then, and assume 5 million bloggers; 5 million people vying with you for literary glory. Given that there are 25,000 places in the pantheon, that puts your chances of success at 1 in 200. This is broadly in keeping with the stats from most publishers, whose estimates of the odds of a first manuscript being published range from 100-1 to 1,000-1.

And then there’s my experience. In my first grown-up job, as an editorial assistant at a small fiction imprint, one of my duties was to plough through the “slush pile”, the unsolicited manuscripts from first-time authors. We received an average of two submissions per working day, and I was there for two years, meaning a total of about 500 MS. And of those 500 submissions, not a single one was of publishable standard. In short, then, you’ve got more chance of being born with an extra finger than you have of seeing that novel on the shelf at Waterstones.

Meanwhile, the number of journalists in the UK last year, according to the ONS, stood at 64,000. If you assume a 40-year career, that means around 1,600 journalists retiring per year. Yet the number of young ’uns signing up for full-time journalism degrees every year is 3,200. Add in those studying it part-time, those doing postgrad courses instead, and the significant number who enter the profession with a different degree (or none), and suddenly, even though you’re shelling out £27,000 for a degree in the subject, your chances of landing a job in the sector are in the region of 25%. A sector that, as all those within it will attest, is basically dying.

Number of full-time, undergraduate journalism students by gender
Create your own infographics

While writing might be a walk in the park, then, getting people to read what you’ve written is more like a marathon against 500 people armed with machetes. But what about the rewards? If all these people so desperately want to write, surely there’s one heckuva pot of gold at the end of the rainbow?

For a fortunate few, writerly life may well be all battered Moleskines in bijou cafes, self-deprecating quips at the Hay festival and enough royalty cheques to wallpaper the billiard room. But these people are so exceptional that, to all intents and purposes, they don’t exist. Forget them. They’re a myth.

To work out how much you can realistically expect to earn, let’s return to the fag packet. Around 310 million books are sold in the UK each year, with a total value of £2.2bn. About 10% of the cover price goes to the author, so that’s £220m to share out between everyone. (I know you can also sell books abroad; but remember, foreign writers sell books here too, and I’m assuming the numbers roughly cancel each other out.) If we go with that earlier figure, and suppose 25,000 UK authors, that works out as £8,800 per head. That’s barely enough to cover your rent.

The fag packet’s probably not too far off the mark here, because a survey by Queen Mary, University of London last year found that the median income for writers (of all stripes) in the UK was £11,000.

But of course, the pot isn’t evenly split. The lion’s share of it goes to your Rowlings and your Grishams and your estates of Stieg Larsson. Of the authors featured in the QMU survey, 5% gobbled up 42.3% of all the available income.

Another poll in 2014 was scarier still: it found that 54% of traditionally published authors and almost 80% of self-published ones had earned less than £600 in the previous year. 17% of them hadn’t banked a penny.

And it’s not as if things are improving. In 2010, 40% of writers made their living from writing alone; by last year, that figure had fallen to 11.5%. Journalists’ salaries, meanwhile, have fallen or remained stagnant since about 2008, and they weren’t bank-breaking then.

So, let’s recap.

If you have decided to write a book, if you have got your shit together sufficiently to finish it, and if you’re happy enough with it to submit it to the judgment of your peers, then you have about a 1 in 500 chance of it getting published (unless you self-publish, of course, but then you’ve got about a 1 in 1,000 chance of anyone reading it).

But that’s not the end of the ifs. Even if you get published, there’s only a 12% chance that you will make enough to survive on; so you have a 1 in 4,000 chance of ever packing in that day job. And your chances of doing a Rowling … well, forget about it.

By way of addressing the last illusion – the lifestyle – I’ll field another question that might have crossed your lips. “Why should we care what you think about writing, Bodle? You’re not a published author! You’re not a columnist in a national newspaper! You haven’t even written much for TV – just a couple of episodes of a US cable sitcom and a few questions for Only Connect! Who are you to butcher our dreams? You’re a fucking subeditor! We want to hear from Dan Brown!”

All true. By many people’s standards – certainly by my own – I am a failure as a writer. I’ve earned maybe £100,000 in about 25 years of wordsmithery, which puts me below the median. But that’s precisely why I’m qualified to talk about the pitfalls. Because whoever you are, if you are reading this, poised to launch your writing career, it’s immensely unlikely, laughably unlikely, that you are going to become the next JK Rowling. What’s infinitely more likely is that you are going to become the next me. And as the outgoing me, I am uniquely qualified to explain what that’s like.

It’s miserable. It’s lonely. You’ll probably never be able to afford your own house. And rejection becomes so routine, you start to wonder whether the Jehovah’s Witnesses will have you. If I could step back in time and have a word with myself about one thing, it would be my ambition to write. “Put the pen down, son. Mug’s game. Go and play football like a normal kid.”

When you spend years writing things, things you’re really proud of, and you have desperate near miss after desperate near miss, the pain, eventually, fades to numbness. But when you hit your late 40s, and you feel the marrow draining from your bones, and it’s too late to entertain any new ambitions, and you suddenly realise that even if you do make it big you’re too old now to really appreciate the benefits, and that your entire time on this planet has, basically, been wasted … That’s a ton of particularly pointy bricks.

That’s basically why I’ve set up this website; not so much as a showcase for my writings as a mausoleum. I will put up some new stuff, from time to time, when I can be fucked, but mostly it’s a warning to future explorers: all hope abandon, ye who enter here.

But enough about me. Writing about myself is even more depressing than being myself, if that’s possible. Back to you, and the positive bit! Because writing does, of course, have a fourth attraction: some people just love doing it. If you’re one of those people, then this number crunch will have done nothing to dampen your ardour. So in my next post, which will appear when I goddamn feel like it, I’ll talk about what you can do to maximise your chances of trouncing the competition.