The Essayist's Notebook

I just read this

The London Magazine (est. 1732) is now accepting pitches for essays, reviews and interviews on an ongoing basis.

The lines are published on the web pages of the Irish Writer's Centre in Dublin. I was browsing, thinking that after more than thirty years I should join. But yes, on an ongoing basis caused this essayist a bit of a twitch. “Ongoing basis” is not merely verbose; it is bureaucratic. It belongs to grant applications, university notices and corporate communications. It's the language of systems talking about processes, rather than people talking about actions. Literary organizations ought to have a more literary ear.

BASYS I recall was a newsroom computer system used by the BBC, ITN, CNN and many other broadcasters from the 1980s onwards. Journalists wrote scripts, managed running orders, exchanged messages, and searched news copy through BASYS terminals long before web-based newsroom systems became common.

BASYS itself became almost invisible because journalists thought of it less as software and more as the newsroom. If someone said “it's on BASYS,” they meant the story, script, contact, or running order was in the system. In the days of the old BBC style often favoured short, concrete wording:

The London Magazine accepts pitches year-round.

A BASYS-trained sub-editor would have deleted “on an ongoing basis” without a second thought.

So, depending on the nuance, they could have written:

is accepting pitches accepts pitches year-round welcomes pitches at any time welcomes submissions throughout the year is open to pitches year-round invites pitches continuously considers pitches throughout the year reviews pitches as they are received has no fixed submission window accepts pitches year-round rather than during specific reading periods is currently open to essay, review and interview pitches accepts pitches without a submission deadline welcomes unsolicited pitches at any time

Or you could simply remove the phrase altogether:

The London Magazine (est. 1732) is accepting pitches for essays, reviews and interviews.

Most readers will assume that if a magazine announces a call for pitches without giving a deadline, submissions are currently open.

The London Magazine welcomes pitches for essays, reviews and interviews throughout the year.

or

The London Magazine is open to pitches for essays, reviews and interviews year-round.

All three say exactly what “on an ongoing basis” means, but sound as if a human being wrote them.

An original note from my Moleskine

It reads like the language of opportunity listings and funding notices. The same institutional voice appears everywhere because organisations increasingly borrow wording from one another. The result is a kind of administrative dialect in which phrases propagate regardless of whether anyone would naturally say them aloud.

An essayist notices such things because essayistic attention begins with a tiny disturbance. Most readers glide over “on an ongoing basis”. The essayist stops. The phrase irritates. It doesn't quite fit the declared purpose of the sentence. And from that small friction emerges a question about how institutions speak, how language becomes automated, and how a phrase once introduced for caution eventually becomes a verbal weed.

The irony is that the announcement concerns pitches for essays, a form whose history is bound up with individual voice. Yet the sentence advertising that opportunity arrives wrapped in language that no identifiable individual would ever use in conversation.

A BASYS-trained sub-editor would have struck it out. Not because it breaks a rule, but because it fails a simpler test: What extra meaning do those three words contribute? The answer is: almost none. And good editing begins when someone notices that.