Neither clichés nor jargon, journalese is the peculiar language that newspapers have evolved for talking to readers.

Unchecked, it can read like this:
"Negotiators yesterday, in an eleventh-hour decision following marathon talks, hammered out agreement on a key wage provision they earlier had rejected."

My! Well! We had better stay tuned for a headline on the inking of this historic pact.

Journalese is not jargon because it is neither specialised nor technical.

It is not cliché because it's too awful to be repeated by anyone.

We write journalese out of habit, sometimes from misguided training, and to sound urgent, authoritative and, well, journalistic. But it doesn't do any of that. Part of journalese is in the words; part is in the construction.

Words and phrases like eleventh-hour, marathon, hammered and key are relatively easy to spot. They show up as readily as their cousin, jargon. All writers or editors need do is load up their personal dictionaries with words that are likely trouble-makers, and then keep eyes and ears open for them. When one shows up, challenge it. Does it belong? Does it tell?

A rewrite man at the old Oakland Tribune compiled these words on the newsroom groan board: despite, spurred, prompted, sparked, spawned, apparently, concerned, area, firm, focus, facility, closure, urged, massive, creating, affordable, potentially, possible, allowed, staffing, upscale, initially, underscored, launched. Mary Ann Hogan, writing coach, passed the list along and suggested cramming as many of those words into one sentence as possible: "Despite the closure of the facility as initially urged by the massive, upscale firm ..."

For some reason (perhaps to protect themselves from assignments), journalists have developed a whole body of journalese for writing about the weather.

People hunker down, especially if they're in the storm's path, for fear of being in destruction's wake when hurricanes batter or punish coastal areas. Tornadoes invade the heartland, while thunderstorms merely blitz the suburbs, pelting them with golfball-sized hail.

Why is it that storms pack winds, but people can't, yet people can pack heat, and weather never does?

It's easy to see why rain dampens spirits, but when it gets cold, really cold, does the mercury truly plunge? Just try to find a thermometer with any mercury in it.

The other part of journalese is in the construction. It is the voice, not the words.

Print journalists smirk at broadcast journalists who turn on their TV or radio voices while on air, but print journalists have a stage voice, too. An otherwise normal person who is a print journalist might say, "I bought that stuff at Costco on the way home from work last night." The same person, writing for print, would write "While traveling home from work Monday, this reporter purchased some items at Costco."

John McIntyre, chief of the copy desk at the Baltimore Sun, offers three kinds of contorted construction that create journalese. The first two have to do with handling time.

• Time element and verb: In English, the adverb of time typically comes at the start of the sentence or after the verb, not after the noun, as in "The governor Thursday "
• Time element with nouns: Usually, a time reference before a noun is taken as a restrictive modifier: "I will catch the 6 p.m. train" (as opposed to the train at 7:30 p.m.) Journalists, however, write about "The Nov. 22, 1963, assassination of John F. Kennedy." Not even conspiracy theorists, McIntyre says, challenge the date of the assassination. If time does not distinguish the event from other events, put it at the end of the sentence, McIntyre says.
• Adverbs with compound modifiers: Somewhere along the line, we got the idea that it is bad to let an adverb come between the auxiliary verb and the main verb, as it does in "we have always lived here." Writing (or editing) that as "we always have lived here" contributes to journalese, but neither to grammar nor clarity. Seventy years ago, says McIntyre, H.W. Fowler speculated that this ill-founded rule rose as a corollary to the equally misguided prohibition against splitting infinitives.

Theodore Bernstein, in "The Careful Writer," wrote that the most proper and natural place for the adverb is safely tucked between the verb and its auxiliary.

So, how do we weed out the words and structures of journalese? The best test is to read the copy aloud to see how it sounds before sending it along. This might make you seem odd to the person sitting next to you. Still, that seems preferable to sounding odd to the thousands who will read your story.