A. Too many clichés, at the end of the day

At the end of the day, British newspapers are full of clichés

Stephen Brook

Shurely some mistake? A new study has found that British newspapers and websites, far from being the best written on the planet, are actually riddled with clichés.

The report, by the news and information company Factiva, found that “at the end of the day” was the most over-used cliché in newspapers and websites – clocking up an eye-watering 3,347 mentions between January and June.

Financial terms “in the red” and “in the black” were second and third in the survey, followed by “level playing field”, “time and again” and “wealth of experience”.

A quick glance shows that financial clichés dominate, as do clichéd references to time (six in the top 20). A wake up call (geddit?) to our business writers, perhaps?

The survey prompted an instant debate here at MediaGuardian towers. I think you can make a case for “in the black”, but I, erm, draw the line at phrases such as “rushed to the scene” – 310 uses in six months, since you ask.

Media clichés are somewhat under-represented, with no mention of “thinking outside the box”, “drilling down deep”, “the long tail” or even “the tipping point”.

Clichés have a shelf life and can outlive their usefulness: can you remember when “twin peaks”, “thousand points of light”, the “information super-highway” and “new world order” were repeated parrot-fashion by just about everybody? Equally, they can sit gathering dust in obscurity until they are picked up by a politician, public figure or TV show, and then become amazingly popular.

But however much we disdain them, there is a reason they catch on and it's not just journalistic laziness. They usually express things rather aptly and thus become the sort of phrase it’s hard to avoid using. Consistent use of language can sometimes help readers. Still, at the end of the day, as journalists we should try to avoid avoid being repetitive and this survey ought to give us plenty of pause for thought.

The Guardian, August 25, 2006

B. Social class affects white pupils’ exam results more than those of ethnic minorities – study

Poverty affects grades less among non-white children with social divide noticeable from primary school

Jessica Shepherd

A child’s social class is more likely to determine how well they perform in school if they are white than if they come from an ethnic minority, researchers have discovered. The gap between the proportion of working-class pupils and middle-class pupils who achieve five A* to C grades at GCSE is largest among white pupils, academics found.

They analysed official data showing thousands of teenagers’ grades between 2003 and 2007. Some 31 % of white pupils on free school meals – a key indicator of poverty – achieve five A* to Cs, compared with 63% of white pupils not eligible for free school meals, they found. This gap between social classes – of 32 percentage points – is far higher for white pupils than for other ethnic groups.

For Bangladeshi pupils, the gap is seven percentage points, while for Chinese pupils it is just five percentage points, the researchers discovered.

The study – Ethnicity and class: GCSE performance – will be presented to the British Educational Research Association conference at Warwick University tomorrow. It argues that one of the reasons why class determines how white pupils perform at school is that white working-class parents may have lower expectations of their children than working-class parents from other ethnic groups.

The researchers, from the Institute of Education and Queen Mary, both part of the University of London, also found that Chinese pupils from families in routine and manual jobs perform better than white pupils from managerial and professional backgrounds. They also discovered that African and Bangladeshi girls had vastly improved their GCSE grades in the last few years.

Researchers from the University of Warwick analysed the scores of pupils living in the south London borough of Lambeth. White children from well-off homes were the top-performing ethnic group at the age of 11, while white pupils eligible for free school meals had among the worst test results.

“More recent immigrant groups, such as the Portuguese, Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities often see education as the way out of the poverty they have come from. By contrast, if you’ve been in a white working-class family for three generations, with high unemployment, you don’t necessarily believe that education is going to change that,” says the study.

The Guardian, September 3, 2010