The readers' editor on… how the paper's use of certain words can rile

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/06/papers-use-certain-words-rile

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One place to start in any assessment of the impact of the web on Guardian journalism is at the basic level of just how many words we now publish in a 24-hour period in print and online compared with the days when there was just a newspaper.

A rough count some years ago led me to tell visitors to our offices that on weekdays it was about 70,000 in print and a similar number on the Guardian's website, while at the weekend the estimate was around 250,000 on a Saturday. I now realise that I have been wrong for some time. My new found knowledge is thanks to an application, created by colleagues in the Guardian's technical development team, which counts them.

For instance, on Tuesday 18 December 2012 the Guardian published 239,757 words in total in print and online. This is the equivalent of a novel slightly longer than East of Eden by John Steinbeck (225,395 words). At an average reading speed of 275 words a minute that day's output would take 15 hours to read. By Friday 21 December 2012 it was 281,488 – heading up towards George Eliot's Middlemarch (316,059) – and a snappy 17 hours to read all of it.

As the application is new there is only a little data available. However, the early figures suggest that the Guardian is producing around 250,000 words every weekday – what it once produced on the supplement-heavy days of a Saturday. Of course readers pick and choose the words they want to read, but each word is there to be read by someone, and inevitably the way the Guardian uses some words riles our readers.

Jane Lane has been waging a campaign to encourage Guardian journalists to use "ethnic" and "ethnicity" correctly. Last autumn she wrote: "The Guardian continues to use the term 'ethnic' incorrectly. In a sensitive and otherwise constructive contribution to the proposed national centenary commemorations of the first world war [Editorial, 12 October 2012], reference is made to 'mark the role of ethnic groups...'. Although the intention is presumably to mean black and other minority ethnic groups, the fact is that everyone has an ethnicity. The leader reference is therefore a nonsense."

And then again a month later: "There was another example in the G2 section on 8 November, in an article We've created some feminists, by Patrick Kingsley, page 11 in the last paragraph but two – 'victims from ethnic backgrounds'. It is such a basic error of fact and misunderstanding that I wonder how many more years I shall have to keep writing in order for the issue to be finally addressed."

The Guardian's style guide states: "Never say ethnic when you mean ethnic minority, which leads to such nonsense as 'the constituency has a small ethnic population'."

Following a reader's expression of concern about the way child abuse images were described as "child porn", the Guardian banned it. A colleague has now lighted on another phrase that she believes is misused: "Sex slave." She cites an agency story on 30 November about a Chinese man keeping women as "sex slaves".

"Googling revealed a whole host of Guardian stories which use the phrase [it has been used four times in the past month] – clearly not intending to titillate, but condemn. But I do feel there's a horribly salacious tone to it, and having asked several colleagues, they agreed. One thought tone okay, though not ideal, but said phrase was unhelpfully vague anyway because it gave no indication of whether you were talking about someone being kept for two weeks or women multiply raped over years by soldiers during the second world war."

She believes we should find another, more accurate way to describe the practice. She makes a suggestion based on agency coverage of an actual case: "An agency wrote: 'A Chinese court sentenced a man to death for holding six women as sex slaves in an underground prison and killing two of them, Xinhua news agency said on Friday.' But an alternative could be: 'A Chinese court sentenced a man to death for imprisoning and repeatedly raping six women he held in an underground prison and for killing two of them, Xinhua news agency said on Friday.'"

That last sounds eminently sensible – what do readers think?