Worried by errors made by students, writers and the media, a veteran broadcaster and retired United Nations (UN) diplomat, Mr. Segun Omolayo, has written a book entitled: POP Errors in English: Writers Beware. In this inteview, he shares his thoughts with ODUNAYO OGUNMOLA.
What is the book all about?
The reading culture is poor and it will be so for some time to come. But my attitude to it is that if I could get two persons who find this book useful, I would be very pleased. And so far, I have seen so many people, who love what they have seen in the book because of the special approach. Femi Orebe, famous columnist with The Nation, said something I could not believe about the book after he read it. He said this book has national relevance, that the whole of writers in Nigeria at various levels, need it, he saw the relevance in it. Then Dr. Babaleye, the Head of Media and Communication Studies at Afe Babalola University, Ado-Ekiti (ABUAD), after reading through, told me it is a writer’s companion. He said any writer needs this book by his side, and I have also discovered that it is also an editor’s companion. I keep editing for people, right now, I am editing PhD thesis sent to me from the University of Ilorin and another PhD thesis from another university locally. I am also editing a 200 page book for a university lecturer. My book is serving as a reference material. What is contained in the book is what good editors are looking for in any writing and the book is a pointer to what they should look for. When you talk of redundancy, or malapropism, when you talk about faulty parallelism, when you talk about wrong sentences and fragmentation, many editors do not bother themselves about such things. Four Sundays ago, The Guardian on Sunday described the book as a good guide for communication.
The motivation was my discovery that writers need a lot of help inmatters like this, particularly communicating effectively in English Language. And my privileged position of editing for university lecturers, superintending broadcast productionas a broadcaster, broadcast manager, newsreader, presenter, General Manager and pioneer General Manager of ADABA FM, Akure Ondo State where I had great responsibility not only for capacity building, but also for quality control.
I was able to see a lot of problems in the way writers write and I was able to articulate some errorswhich I call “pop errors” and the title of the book is Pop Errors in English: Writers Beware. The nature of what I have done over 15 years that I edited for lecturers, I was the final gatekeeper for the news and on occasion. This is because of my consciousness of the great responsibility of a newscaster not only to himself, but also to the station and the profession, as well as the state and even the government that owns the station. I was conscious of what I read out to the public. That was the foundation of the book to a large extent because after sometime, I started naming the errors I was finding in the bulletin by their names. Even before that time, there were some of these errors I did not know by their names. But, intuitively I knew something was wrong in a particular construction but the name of those errors I did not know. So, I had to research and continue until I found the names for all the errors I observed in the bulletin. That led me to presenting a lecture to the house every month as capacity building programmes.
On one of the occasions, I had the privilege to feature and I presented what I called Pop Errors. In fact, the outline I used for Pop Errors in that lecture was what I developed further for the book. It is a book of over 500 pages. Ifound out that writers across board and the lecturers I was editing for make such mistakes we made in broadcasting.When I read columnists and reporters, I saw that kind of errors. When I pioneered the ADABA FM, I saw that my staff members in the news department made such mistakes. When I proceeded to UnitedNations where I spent eight years, I found out that these same errors were made by my colleagues. For eight years, I functioned as one of the editors of input from colleagues coming from various departments and outposts. So, this was a particularly useful platform for me. In fact, that was where the idea of the book matured. I told you I started thinking about it whenI was still at the Broadcasting Service of Ekiti State as Director of Programmes. But, it matured when I got to the United Nations. I found out that it was the same errors that writers there were making, so that’s why it took me solong to package the book. I used examples from all these experiences, books, seminar papers, journals, articles and other writings that I worked on for university lecturers, books that I edited forother authors and things that I saw somewhere else. I got a tremendous feeling from Prof KunleAjayi, a lecturer atEkiti State University, Ado Ekiti. I just finished working on a journal for him. He was the editor of that journal. So, after I finished that journal, he was so pleased and said, uncle, why not write a book to share the skills and techniques you are using in doing such fantastic editing work for us. I got seriously encouraged and motivated and I was determined to write the book. That was the motivation and story behind the book.
How long did it take to finish the book?
It took me 10 years to write this book and the reason is: I told youI was in Broadcasting Service of Ekiti State where I started noting these things and working on them. I was encouraged by a university professor. That was about 2007 and kept working on it, accumulating examples because all the examples you see in this book used to illustrate the mistakes and errors I highlighted are live examples.They are things written by somebody either as a university lecturer, as an author or a UN diplomat or a columnist, they are live examples.
And these things kept coming in a rush every day. So, the compilation and accumulation of these copious examples is one reason it took so long to write and why I did use so many examples is because you and I will make the same mistake indifferent ways. Let me give you an example. If I say “I cannot be able”, that is a very bad English and you write “I could not be able”, it’s also a bad English we are making the same kind of mistakes, but in different ways. Any reader of this book will encounter themselves in this book.
