Haha. Just foraspiring auto journalists

"The nice folks at autowriters.com published a modified version of Avoidable Contact #31 last week, and as one might suspect it’s raised quite the fervor among the Frank Bacons of the world. This is all well and good, but it has occurred to me that, in the course of exposing the mendacity/mediocrity two-punch combo which characterizes our industry, I may have inadvertently crushed some of my readers’ dreams of becoming an automotive “journalist”. To those readers, I offer my most sincere apologies.

Better yet, I offer a solution. Instead of becoming an automotive journalist, why not become an English automotive journalist? Trust me, it’s a better gig. Not only will you instantly acquire the kind of cast-iron credibility that American autowriters will never so much as sniff, if you are lucky someone may even bring you back “across the pond” to run an American auto rag!

Naturally, you’ll need a little help to make this dream become reality. I cannot help you fake the accent, and I cannot teach you to operate a stick-shift with your left hand, but I can show you how to write just like an English journo. It’s easy! I’ve provided five “tropes” below to get you started. According to the nice people at tvtropes.org, a site I am not linking directly because it’s so good you will never return to S:S:L, “Tropes are “devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members’ minds and expectations.” It’s almost impossible to find a Brit-rag article that does not use one or more of these, so a solid command of this fab five is essential to your future career. Each trope is carefully described and a kind-of-fictional example is provided for your use. What are you waiting for? Get writing — and by next week you could be driving an Azure on the Mulsanne!"

Read on for the examples:

Instantly become a British autowriter

I've seen most of these tropes in action in the magazines.

Haha...

I miss COK4SAL already.

I read the 5 tropes in an alternating Clarkson-Hammond-May rotation. Awesome.

Hah! I read quite a lot of Brit car mags, and those are all true! (Though I've never picked up on any before.) English Auto journalists write so eloquently (or glibly?), that they easily get away with it.

FWIW, I prefer the more "down to earth" style of American Auto mags, like GRM.

Speaking of British car magazines, there was an article in Octane a few months ago about a vintage hill climb car dubbed the Bloody Mary. I enjoyed the writing very much - the first paragraph of the story started out with

You have to wonder what today’s Health and Safety brigade would make of John Bolster’s vintage special Bloody Mary. It was, as Bolster once wrote, built by two schoolboys in 1929 ‘…with the object of driving around a field as dangerously as possible’.

So they had me hooked right from the start.

http://www.classicandperformancecar.com/features/octane_features/247345/john_bolsters_bloody_mary.html

I have a list of words in my head that I wish I would never here an automotive journalist use again. Of course, I can't think of them right now, but they drive me nuts.

One that I can remember is "antediluvian." Apparently, auto journalists haven't found a thesaurus that would allow them to find another term for "outdated" in the past 30 years.

The autowriter story is very funny. My wife will get a kick out of it and she's not really into cars at all.

You know what phrase drives me absolutely batty, it's just so stiff and dated and weasel-speak.. "shifter falls readily to hand" Now really, just wtf does that actually mean?

See, I'm originally British, so I would never use such a mundane phrase in any of my reviews. Then again, I guess I shouldn't talk, having been responsible for this in a Truth about Cars review five years ago:

"The gear shifter looks like nothing so much as a ribbed play toy from the naughty store. The gates are as nebulous as a Car and Driver editorial, bereft of that dead-certain snickery familiar to drivers of Japan’s– or Maranello’s– finest. Urban Tuscani drivers face this shortcoming on a regular basis, what with the six-speed gearbox clamoring for constant attention. The Tuscani provides a textbook example of how not to space your gears; first and second are gone in a blink, sixth is for fuel conservation only."