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CAMPUSLIFE AND ITS LOW POINT


Related to country: Nigeria
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A disclaimer first: I am not one of those base readers who superfluously find faults with news pieces or write-ups. As I am not an unscrupulous arm-chair gadfly, I crave that my felicitous critique of the racy and informative Campuslife pull-out be viewed as a compulsive reader’s contribution towards the enhancement of the quality of that segment of the rich Thursday The Nation newspaper.
Except one is a hardnosed doppelganger of that famous biblical personage – Thomas the doubter –, it would be pretty difficult to aver that campuslife is a worthless idea. For the avoidance of doubt, since the celebrated advent of the beat, numberless Nigerian students and youths; oodles of school administrators; and of course innumerable heads of public and private institutions of higher learning have benefited immensely, in one way or another, from it. More fortunate amongst these groups are students, especially those of them in the Southern axis of the country – students from the North are yet connect meaningfully to this all-important grid.
To be precise, many students have discovered, to their very delight, that one of the best ways to hone their writing skills is by constantly putting pen to paper. Many others have established themselves in the penumbra of their fellow compatriots as being parts of the movement for a better country where education is accorded the due attention as is the case in many countries of our gradually shrinking world. Indeed, a lot more have also been availed the means to ventilate their self-considered views on variegated issues. They enjoy the benefits of playing major roles on their campuses as a result of their news-gathering and writing engagements. What is more, a reasonable number have gained tremendously by participating in the apposite annual workshop sponsored by Coca-Cola. Some have even smiled to the bank.
The icing on the cake is that there appears to be no hiding place again on our campuses for dissolute and atrocious students, lecturers and school officials who thrive on nefarious and reprehensible endeavours to take cover due to the fact that the increasing armies of student reporters contributing to Campuslife are formidably on ground with their sensitive noses and limpid search-lights. Even the sorely irritating hotchpotch of rapscallions that, severally, instigates gratuitous ruckus on our campuses is striving laboriously to feign virtue, though it is alien to their highly repulsive lives. Truth is; in the last two years, Campuslife has done many things to people of different hues. Rendered differently, the introduction of aunty Ngozi’s eight-page bloc in the Nigerian communication space is like the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ which the holy writ says is for the rise of some and the fall of others. As a dedicated votary of the paper, this writer can turn out a volume on the many invaluable things Campuslife has done to Nigeria and its younger generation. It is no wonder, therefore, that the newspaper is a commercial success. May its fortunes continue to grow in leaps and bounds.
Flipside, there is something that sullies the squeaky clean attire of Campuslife pull-out. One wouldn’t have bothered to sign-post this if not for the frequency and consistency of its infelicitous occurrence. I feel heavily pained to point out that in my weekly perusal of the paper, many of the articles, features, cover stories and news pieces are usually riddled and encumbered with grammatical bloomers of varying degrees. No careful and finicky reader who truly belongs to the fast decreasing tribe of those who inexorably believe in the view that good and impeccable English is the plate with which a body of thoughts should be served can agree less that such incessant and untidy applications of the tidy rules of grammar as is often the case on the pages of Campuslife make reading exceedingly uninteresting. If the beauty of a published piece on the pull-out is not rendered unsightly by untoward use of punctuation marks, a conscious and observant reader is sure to be saddled with one largely made unreadable by inelegant expressions, wrong use of words, unintelligible use of tenses, or terrifying spelling errata amongst many other linguistic inexactitudes. Thus, most of the items published on Thursdays for anxious and expectant readers literally turn out to be lilies in the overly muddy swathes.
The most dismally deployed punctuation marks are; comma, colon, semi-colon, italics, quotation marks, and hyphen. To joust that the unguarded misapplications of these essential punctuation marks by different student writers are excusable is the easiest way to encourage immobilising ignorance in this area. The unvarnished truth is that many of these students are untutored in the fundamental uses of these grammatical items. This accounts for why their write-ups, stories and features are poor and unattractive, for according to Arlo Bates, ‘no man can write really well who does not punctuate well, who cannot vitally mean every punctuation mark as clearly and vigorous as he means every world.’
Also, the errors in their uses of tenses are legendary. If you are not told that ‘the student said that he is...’, you are likely to read that ‘the SUG president shouted and call...’ Wrong use of words like ‘severally’ (as in; The VC said that severally), ‘round up’ instead of ‘round off’ (as in; The Students’ Representative Council rounded up its meeting...), and the use of non-existing words like ‘vandalisation’ instead of ‘vandalism’ which is the appropriate noun, are recurring decimals on that beat. Sometimes, one reads something like ‘in spite of’ and ‘in fact’ written as ‘inspite of/infact’. In some cases, it is the worrisome inability of these writers to distinguish clearly between the American and the British brands of English that assaults readers’ sensibilities. With the use of the two versions at the levels of spelling and lexis in one singular piece, there is no other way to adjudge a writer as being inconsistent other than in this respect. Just as it is unacceptable to use ‘centre’ (British) and ‘traveling’ (American) in one essay, so also is it impossible to subordinate grammatical correctness for grammatical iniquities, inequities, or infidelities.
What is inferable from the foregoing anomaly is that the materials sent in by students, though most often badly written and typed, are not always painstakingly edited. And I dare asseverate that this is where the editor of the pages is culpable. If students get it wrong, should the editor/proof-reader not get it right? If the callow writers mess it up, should the supposed experienced hands not take time to rid it of the eye-sores? Students may turn in pieces harbouring unliterary expressions and abhorring good phrases and requisite idiomatic expressions, can’t the editor who went to school in the glorious days of the Nigerian education system bring her professional touch to bear in her engagement with students’ write-ups? Again, if we excuse other inconsequential errors that find their ways into the pages due to human fatigue, what we can learn from the constant appearances of the grammatical aberrations that do struggle for relevance with the contents of Campuslife is that there is a tiresome disregard of the fact that newspapers, apart from their information and enlightenment function, are a veritable avenue for learners and users of English language to learn the appropriate phrases that do not violate or stand linguistic rules on the head. There seems to be a kind of cavalier stance to the possibility that inexperienced and amateurish users of the ‘colonial’ language can take those avoidable, riling grammatical faux pas to be the correct forms, make use of them and in the end become twice ignorant of the correct usages. A look at the boondoggles our students in secondary schools, colleges, polytechnics and universities dignify as letters, project works and long essays will further attest to this claim.
It is in view of this extremely shaming (sadly, many Nigerians hardly see it as such!) reality that I venture to call for more vigilance on the part of the editor. Since what is served on these pages are more than information, it is ineluctably becoming for the editor to carefully, scientifically and patiently ensure that each of the items to be published is professionally edited; after all, it is not possible for one to serve one’s visitors food with broken china. However, the burden of the editor can be drastically reduced if the writers are schooled in the very fundaments of good writings. One of the best ways to do this is by incorporating a session – that is if it does not exist – that chiefly centres on good writing into the yearly Coca-Cola sponsored programme. If this is not feasible, the editor can reach out to another company or organisation to shoulder this responsibility financially. There are seasoned expert and professors of English whose services can be sought.
Additionally, The Nation newspaper has a few five-star essayists (thorough-going language purists) who themselves are evidently concerned about serving ideas and clinical analyses of local and foreign social, economic and political affairs on the captivating platter of prepossessing and elegant English. Welcome the inimitable Tatalo Alamu, a merchant of words who has successfully turned words into weapons of mass disarmament with which he duels the impenitent and callous human jackals that make life miserable for Nigerians. There is the feisty, percipient and highly perceptive Idowu Akinlotan who attractively deploys wounding verbal salvos in his chosen task of speaking raw truths to power. Can we ignore the sheer brilliance and dexterity of the educated minds that are Tope Adenle and Sola Fasure? These admirable writers can be invited to educate Campuslife reporters and other users of the language.
One other way of encouraging these young writers to mind their use of grammar, the engine room of language, is by getting good grammar books for them. It should not be monetary or happy birthday greetings alone. Good grammar books should be part of the gifts. Above all, writers and readers alike need to be overwhelmed with periodic messages emphasising the unquantifiable benefits of reading good literatures; of course not for the purpose of any examination, but for the enrichment of their minds and the equipping of their vocabulary base, for no one can be a good writer without first being a compulsive reader. The latter enhances the former. If these ideas are conscientiously appropriated, I am doubly sure that The Nation would have succeeded in being instrumental to the making of good writers whose works reek of undoctored finesse and panache. Moreover, the paper will equally succeed in weaning the student writers of the false impression that because their articles or stories are published, then they must be fine, great scribblers.
I should like to state with all sense of conviction that if the Campuslife contents are published with minimal punctuation incorrections, syntactic imprecision, spelling blunders, lexical infidelities, dry and drab expressions, and semantic equivocation, there is no modicum of dubitation in the fact that readers will appreciate it the more, while those who are repelled by the unsalutary violation of linguistic rules (and I know a number of them) that is almost becoming the norm rather than the exception in many media outlets will feel secured to commit their hard-earned naira and peaceably pore over the beautifully written news pieces, opinions, features and whatnot.



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