Ms. Thevanayagam's Rickety Henhouse

| by Padraig Colman

( May 31, 2012, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) People who live in glass houses should undress in the dark.

This is an extremely badly-written article full of muddled thinking. It is replete with the faults the writer claims to find in others. It seems that she is dwelling in the groves of academe while condemning academics. It is amazing that anyone could pay her to teach writing if she writes like this.

I’m not quite sure what the point of the article is. It would be spiked by any self-respecting editor of the old school. She should study Orwell on the craft of getting an idea across as simply as possible.

“...would have moved on faster than a scud missile” lame simile tritely expressed.

“these writers insist the readers should take their seminal works very seriously indeed” – Although they express their views hoping they will be taken seriously, surely they cannot “insist” on anything. Whatever their faults, I do not think these writers would consider their articles seminal”. Does she know what seminal means or does she just like the sound of it?

“Quite literally they are inept at comprehending” what useful work is “Quite literally” doing in that sentence?

“Newspapers are now a luxury to the average person and they had better have their money’s worth and news which are easily digestible rather than reaching for Roget’s Thesaurus.” I think she is making the point that writing should be kept simple. I quite agree and wish she would follow that maxim. It would be more useful to reach for a dictionary than a Thesaurus in the circumstances she describes.

“Where else but in the US would one find universities offering PhDs for those who have failed to attain a decent A/L qualification in their home countries to enable them to pursue university education.”

What has this got to do with her gripe against Michael Roberts? He was educated in Peradeniya and Oxford and taught in Australia. Has he got a PhD from the USA? She herself is Asia Pacific Journalism Fellow at UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. I don’t know where she was educated or whether she went beyond A/L but this seems to be a case of pots and kettles.

“Roberts opined in a local website – popular for publishing lengthy discourses on any given topic and generally restricted to the owner and editor of the website”. What website is that? If it is restricted to the owner and editor of the website how can it be at the same time “popular for publishing lengthy discourses on any topic”. If it is restricted to the editor and owner how is Michael Roberts “opining” on it? Who else but a Sri Lankan would use the archaic term “opined”. It sounds as though she might mean Groundviews. I have been published on Groundviews. I am not the editor or owner. Pearl Thevanayagam has been published on Groundviews. She is not the editor or owner. Sloppy thinking, sloppy writing.

“Experienced journalists can spot a charlatan miles away and they are also very astute at getting to the bottom of the truth.”” Leading editors in Sri Lanka have years of experience”. If this is so, why does Dayan Jayatilleke, whom she seems to be including in her gang of charlatans, get all of his articles published in all of the English-language papers?

“The proof readers (now extinct) and sub-editors have far more knowledge of how the readers want their money’s worth than these so called academics in ivory towers.” If they are extinct, what relevance do they have to this argument? The past tense “had” should be used instead of “have”. What does the rest of the paragraph have to do with this opening sentence?

George Orwell wrote that “intellectuals must speak intelligibly with the right words and in the right tone of voice if they hope to contribute to social progress. Some authors seem to be intent on hiding their meaning, as if they feel they can hoard power because of their ability to employ words that are obscure. They are not even writing for their own coterie but writing for themselves…As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.”

Mrs Thevanayagam has herself constructed a rickety henhouse.