’Tis the season for a reminder at The New York Times: In articles, holiday clichés are not gifts that keep on giving.
(To editors reading this: The above opener was for illustrative purposes only, of course.)
Every year, a memo is circulated throughout the Times newsroom to remind reporters to resist the urge to write holiday clichés into articles. Words and phrases to reconsider using include “deck the halls,” “Yule,” and yes, “’tis the season.”
Reporters are encouraged to steer clear of clichés year-round, as trite phrases lack originality and specificity. But avoiding them can be tricky — and using them, tempting — especially during the holiday season.
This year’s email, sent in early December, proclaimed: “Tired, shopworn phrases make readers’ eyes glaze over and suggest we’re working on autopilot. And the tiredest, shopwornest clichés of all tend to make their appearance right around this time of year.”
The first memo was sent in the early 1990s by Allan M. Siegal, an assistant managing editor who long shaped and guarded The Times’s tone and standards.
Mr. Siegal’s brief message stated that journalists should “fend off holiday doggerel, odes and other departures from the accustomed subject matter of standing columns and departments.”
Mr. Siegal, who was revered by his newsroom colleagues and is remembered as a stalwart defender of Times style, worked at The Times for nearly 50 years, and served as a trusted authority on the language and ethics of the paper. Per his Times obituary in 2022, Mr. Siegal was part of the team that edited The Times’s reporting on the Pentagon Papers in the early 1970s; he oversaw the paper’s transition to electronic typesetting; and he helped lead the operation of a national edition of the newspaper. He also became well-known in the newsroom for using a green felt-tip pen to edit. (He produced an in-house bulletin about editing and writing called “Greenies.”)
In the late 1990s, he helped edit and expand “The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage.” And in 2003, he became the first editor of The Times’s Standards team, which helps maintain the rigor, quality and tone of our journalism. (To this day, Standards editors are the keepers and senders of the holiday memo, which has become a welcomed newsroom tradition.)
Mr. Siegal did leave the door slightly ajar for the occasional holiday ornamentation: “If someone thinks a particularly fine inspiration warrants an exception, let’s please discuss it,” he wrote.
Some holiday clichés have slipped through over the decades, especially in headlines: “Mazda Has All the Trimmings About Cars”; “Office Christmases, Grinch by Grinch”; and “Making a List, Checking It Twice: BlackBerry or iPhone?”
Some of those headlines of holidays past are serviceable. (Whether any were discussed with Mr. Siegal is unclear.) But The Times, like any newspaper, is always looking for ways to deliver the best, clearest writing it can to readers. Minimizing imprecise language and overused phrases is a good place to start.
Of course, playful writing is encouraged when appropriate, and when used sparingly and deftly, a self-aware holiday phrase can add a clever punctuation to a piece. Take this headline on an article from 2015 on a home adorned with 58,000 Christmas lights: “All Is Bright. Very, Very Bright.”
Since the first iteration of the memo, more language has been added to the list, including references to the Grinch, the phrase “Christmas came early for” and using “gift” as a verb.
“We don’t like clichés in general,” said Mark Bulik, an assistant Standards editor who has been the sender of the memo since he joined the team in 2020. “We like fresh writing, and so do readers.”
His email this year prompted some tongue-in-cheek replies from journalists across the newsroom:
“Bah hum … oh, never mind.”
“Thank you for gifting this every year.”
“Ah, the storied editing tips from Al Siegal will be with us forever!”
While The Times’s annual reminder has become an object of journalistic lore, Mr. Siegal himself couldn’t resist ending his original memo with a festive twist of his own:
“The temptations are great to do things that the reader will find less sparkling than we do. So be good, for goodness’ sake.”
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