A vintage primary-school classroom scene in black & white

Common objections to Plain English #1

/in ,

A number of criticisms have been levelled against Plain English. In this latest series of blogs I want to try to counter, mitigate or even celebrate, some of them. In doing so, I hope to reassure any potential Plain English converts out there who might be having doubts.

OBJECTION #1: ‘It’s all just grammar and punctuation’

I should start by saying that I’ve only ever heard this objection in relation to Plain English once. Nonetheless, I’ve included it in this series because it’s something people often say to put down language and writing guidance in general. That may be because they’re unsure of or put off by what they see as ‘rules’ when it comes to writing—a hangover from their schooldays, perhaps—but I’m not sure. If you have any thoughts on this, I’d love to hear them.

In my view, grammar and punctuation are not elitist, irrelevant or unreasonable impositions. Why? Because every time you speak, put pen to paper or press finger to keyboard, you use them. And most of the time you do so effortlessly and correctly, without thinking about it. If you didn’t use them, all you’d produce are endless strings of randomly ordered words that your readers would find hard, if not impossible, to make sense of [1].

COUNTER-OBJECTIONS

In terms of how much you need to understand grammar and punctuation when it comes to Plain English, I would make three points:

1.   Plain English is, first and foremost, about the language you use. It’s about 1) using everyday words and phrases that people are familiar with and which are unambiguous in their meaning; and, it’s about 2) putting those words and phrases into straightforward, natural sentences, as if you were talking to someone you know well.

e.g. ‘No football’, as opposed to ‘Recreational activities using a hard ball are not allowed’

And that’s it. If you can get into the habit of writing in those two ways you’ve cracked it, and neither grammar nor punctuation need be mentioned.

2.   That said, Plain English does have something to do with grammatical style. Lurking beneath your wonderfully plain sentences—and indeed your unplain ones—are certain grammatical constructions. But here’s the good news: You don’t need to know what they are to write clearly or unclearly, as I’ve explained above.

If, on the other hand, you’re interested in that kind of thing or think it would help to know the theory behind the practice, we’d be happy to tell you more about the technical stuff.

Luckily for everyone, our TEPL training (Teaching English as a Plain Language) is unusual in that it caters for both learning styles.

3.   Finally, however, Plain English has nothing to do with punctuation, full stop (pun intended😁)!

__________________

[1] Some level of grammar and punctuation is essential if you want people to be able to understand you. However, not every ‘rule’ is. Take a look at both this sentence and the sentence this footnote refers to. Some grammarians will say you should never end a sentence with words like ‘to’ or ‘of’. I’ve chosen to ignore that here in favour of keeping things natural and conversational.

Photo courtesy of the Austrian National Library on Unsplash.

 

 

Jack Nicholson was right!

/in

In a poll conducted in 2009, Britons voted the line from the 1992 film A Few Good Men – “You can’t handle the truth” – the most memorable movie quote of all time.

For those who don’t know, the words are uttered by Jack Nicholson’s Colonel Jessup when his testimony concerning the death of a fellow Marine is challenged in a military court. The implication of the phrase is of course that some facts are simply too sensitive or repellent for us to know.

Wind forward nearly 20 years to the publication of The Chambers Dictionary (TCD) 12th edition, and it seems that the Colonel was on to something. For in its Word Lover’s Miscellany, TCD now has a page devoted to what it calls ‘weasel words’ – terms ranging from the ‘slightly evasive to [the] brazenly euphemistic’, constructed precisely with the aim of making otherwise unpalatable truths digestible.

The page lists just 37 examples – disinformation appropriately being one of them – but even within that relatively small number several unsettling observations can be made. The first of these is that the most common theme running through them (encompassing as many as 11 terms by my count) is that of war. Another eight words or phrases refer to making people redundant, while a further six allude to poverty or debt. Granted, there’s little call for euphemisms to describe uncontentious, happy subjects (there are none in TCD to do with sex so I’ve ignored that topic here). What does it say, though, of how far we’ve come that terms of warfare form the most populous category?

What strikes me next are the differences in the nature of each category’s euphemisms. When it comes to war it appears that anything can be justified, by reference to either our own virtuous motives (liberate, pre-emptive self-defence, regime change); the dastardly deeds of others (ethnic cleansing, unlawful enemy combatant); or extreme situations that force us to act extremely in turn (enhanced interrogation, extraordinary rendition, asymmetric warfare). Even when we have nothing or no-one else to blame – e.g. blue-on-blue, friendly fire and collateral damage – the insinuation that certain outcomes are to a degree inevitable and therefore less deserving of condemnation is palpable.

Euphemisms for staff redundancies have a different quality. They peddle the belief that things are being made better, albeit according to some de-humanising, quantifiable formula – becoming leaner (downsize, headcount reduction); more efficient (rightsize, efficiencies, streamline); or simply different (change management, re-engineering, restructuring). By contrast, when it comes to the poor it seems we prefer our descriptors passive, carefully avoiding any nod to blame or cause (disadvantaged, underprivileged), while we like to dress up debt in a veneer of opaque business-speak (leveraging/deleveraging, liquidity shortfall, consolidation).

The examples I’ve presented thus far are probably all more or less familiar to you. Too familiar, perhaps, if you will bear with me, because my final observation concerns two less common phrases – certainly ones I had not previously encountered – as follows: wrong-site surgery and benign neglect. Both I find especially sinister. Why they particularly alarm me is that by inventing them we have given the ideas behind them a tangibility and legitimacy they do not merit: instances of operating on the wrong part of someone’s body are terrible mistakes, not acceptable inevitabilities; the other is a chilling oxymoron. What really worries me though, is the suspicion that several years ago I might have said exactly the same thing about the others.

So let me end with a lesser-known quote, but one we would be wise to remember too, from Flannery O’Connor: “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”

An overcompensation of nouns

/in

I’ve no idea if children are taught about collective nouns in schools these days. I hope so, because they make for some marvellous images – contrast a piteousness of doves with an exaltation of larks; be captivated by a charm of finches but beware a deceit of lapwings; does an unkindness of ravens lead to a lamentation of swans? And really, a rout of snails?

The origins of these so-called terms of venery are to be found in the late middle ages and the fashion at that time of developing specialist vocabulary around hunting. Then, being able to apply the correct terminology was viewed more as a sign of one’s position in society than a genuine attempt at being understood. In a hopefully more interesting than usual segue into this my latest blog, I would suggest that over five hundred years later the language of officialdom performs much the same role.

Moreover, one of the devices by which it does this is another category of abstract noun: the nominalisation. Here too, abstract nouns (i.e. not physical objects) are formed from an original verb. Hence, an overcompensation of nouns or a deployment of nominalisations – or as I would put it, the practice of transforming perfectly capable verbs into rather pompous-sounding nouns. Consider this real-life example below:

‘The initial stages of the inspection involved the dispatch of a questionnaire, known as an overarching protocol, from W for completion by X being inspected. External scrutiny of financial management during the inspection was provided by Y. The inspection also involved collaborative scrutiny with Z in relation to X’s race equality scheme.’

And now consider the following re-wording:

‘In the initial stages of the inspection we sent out a questionnaire or protocol for X to complete. We are grateful to Y for examining on our behalf how X manages its finances and to Z for its help in assessing X’s race equality scheme.’

I hope you will agree that not only are the verb forms perfectly capable of conveying the intended meaning, they are a great deal slicker at it.

The usual charge against nominalisations is that they make for turgid and passive language; that is, by removing the verb they remove a sense of action too. I agree and I have a couple more objections to add.

The first is that they also impede the flow of sense. Look again at the “collaborative scrutiny” sentence above. It takes longer to grasp the meaning of this term than it does its replacement, “help in assessing”. The same could be said of the entire original extract and its revised version. Hence nominalisations require more effort from the reader in order simply to understand what is being said.

If imparting information is your main goal, then overusing these stylistic devices is likely to be self-defeating. For the public sector, which appears to nurture some of the worst offenders while striving to be open and transparent, the caution is particularly apposite. As the Roman rhetorician Quintilian justly urged: one should not aim at being possible to understand, but at being impossible to misunderstand.

So why do so many persist in writing in this way? Well, to my second point. As far as I can see much of the use of nominalisations is about aggrandizement. In our example, the simple acts of sending out a questionnaire and so on are given a makeover in order to paint them as somehow more impressive or deserving of our regard. The premise may sound a little ludicrous; but the truth, I suspect, is not that far off.

If you remain unconvinced, then consider this last aberration – sortation facility. It reached me courtesy of an email from a well-known delivery company, alerting me to the fact that my parcel had reached what most of us would know as its sorting facility. Why would anyone change a perfectly explanatory and familiar term with something needlessly contrived?

Despair not, though. How often do you come across specialist hunting vocabulary these days?😉

The business of being Shakespeare

/in

On one of my recent Google trawls I came upon this description of lawn weeds: Flowering weeds can appear attractive to the untrained eye, but they are an eyesore to someone who is striving to maintain a healthy lawn with curb appeal.

Put the curb [or better still, kerb] appeal bit to one side, substitute flowery words and writing style for flowering weeds and lawn respectively, and the sentence above could be an introduction to this article.

Now, I know what you’re going to say: Shakespeare was a prolific coiner of words and is considered one of the greatest exponents of the English language. Nor would I disagree. It is estimated that he introduced more than 1,700 new words to the vast enrichment of our vocabulary, eyesore being one of them. (Be careful what you end up defending, though. However much Sarah Palin may will it otherwise, pun intended, refudiate is simply wrong!) Today, nearly 400 years since his death, the business world has arguably become our Shakespeare. But where Shakespeare’s eloquence illuminates and delights, much of the self-important verbiage of business simply makes us cringe.

Let me give you an example: updation. It appeared one day in a work email to my partner, informing him of a recent update to a meeting item. Perhaps, I thought, English was not the writer’s first language. Perhaps this was, in fact, an impressive display of a non-native English speaker applying the rules of English grammar as he understood them? If so his educated guess, though incorrect, was to be admired.

Unfortunately, it was not. It was simply a made-up word.

But why? Our expansive vocabulary already permits various ways of saying the same thing; indeed, it’s thanks to one of them (update) that we’re able to make sense of this contrived offshoot. Nor can it be that update is somehow less explanatory or precise, if only because its substitute, being entirely made up, has no generally recognised meaning.

Unfortunately, I suspect, the reason for its unwarranted appearance has more to do with a misguided sense of style; that style, if you will forgive me, being in F.L. Lucas’ words ‘the natural pompousness of the official mind'(1).

Similar inventions, used to replace entirely appropriate and existent word forms just because they are ordinary, include terms like impactful, ongoing, multi-perspectivity, moisturisation and deplane. I have no doubt that the Campaign for Plain English can provide others. Then there is the equally gratuitous related practice of hijacking the meaning of existing words. Think impacted, visioning and sea-change, the latter another of Shakespeare’s creations (from The Tempest).

Lest you think that I’m simply against neologisms, let me offer you meh. I’m too old to use it convincingly myself – the bored disinterest that young people do so well. But how aptly meh does this, capturing the attitude precisely, succinctly and in a way that no other word does. Hence, I understand its recently granted status as a word. But, if I were to paraphrase George Orwell: It is often easier to make up words … than to think up the English words that will cover one’s meaning (2), you might understand why I am resigned to waking up one day to find that updation too has become a real word.

(1) F.L. Lucas (1955) Style: The Art of Writing Well, Cassell & Co. Ltd.
(2) George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946

Political correctness gone bland?

/in

In this second issue of my blog I am going to start by issuing a warning: I’m about to take issue with the word issue.

Too many issues? I agree. However, in my defence each of my uses of the word is pertinent: publications have issues, warnings are issued and disgruntled people like me do take issue with things.

But read any official report, political speech or departmental memo these days and you will see that the word has developed a few issues of its own, not least that it is now everywhere! We have medical issues, issues with young people, crime-related issues, planning issues, issues of accountability, issues for discussion, and so on. And so on and so on, because there appears to be no limit to its application. Understandable, given that it has become as explanatorily incisive as the word thing. Its overuse has rendered it almost meaningless.

But why should a word that dulls meaning be so popular?

I have two possible explanations to offer. The first speaks to our passivity and recalls the advice of George Orwell in his 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language: ‘never use a metaphor, simile or other figures of speech that you are used to seeing’. His argument was that to do so could be considered ‘lazy thinking and writing’.

The second implies motive and argues that in these times where the choice arises, appearing conciliatory is preferable to being unambiguous – hence the title of this post. Thus, a sympathetic way of interpreting the popularity of issue is its ability to deploy euphemism. For example, I might not know exactly what issues of accountability are being encountered when I read of them, but thanks to the euphemistic undertone implied I can be fairly certain that they are ‘not a good thing’.

But, hold on. Euphemism is defined by The Chambers Dictionary (12th Ed.) as ‘a figure of rhetoric by which an unpleasant or offensive thing is described or referred to by a milder term’. Are the words that issue has supplanted – condition, complaint, problem, question, difficulty, obstacle, to list just a few – truly so unpleasant or offensive as to be in need of toning down?

Read any department’s customer feedback policy and we are likely to be told that it views our complaints as affirmation of its culture of openness and self-improvement. Delve into a self-help guide and chances are that we will be exhorted to acknowledge our problems as a first step to resolving them. Are you offended by their language? I suspect not. Now re-read the sentences above, replacing complaints and problems with issues. Have they ceased to make good sense to you? I suspect so.

As for why any of it matters, whether you agree that language shapes thought on any deeper intellectual level, the recurring use of one word to encapsulate a range of meanings must surely at the very least blunt it. So too, our ability to communicate our thoughts. How can we motivate our audience to act, or even just understand or empathise with us if we fail to be clear?

And, what if you do believe that language shapes thought? Will suppressing all explicit reference to the concept of problems mean that politically the need to deal with them as such will eventually cease to exist too? Well on that note, let me leave you with another piece of Orwellian wisdom:

It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is quite simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take ‘good’ for instance. If you have a word like ‘good’, what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’ will do just as well – better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of ‘good’, what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like ‘excellent’ and ‘splendid’ and all the rest of them? ‘Plusgood’ covers the meaning; or ‘doubleplusgood’ if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already, but in the final version of Newspeak there’ll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words – in reality, only one word. Don’t you see the beauty of that, Winston?

From George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, first published by Secker and Warburg in 1949.