clipped from www.theage.com.auJoin Winnie's war and mind your language
- Andrew Pegler
- March 30, 2009
WINSTON Churchill might be well known for the battles he waged in the name of the Allied forces, but it is the lesser-known war he declared on the desecration of the English language that still rages.
At the height of the Battle of Britain, with war all around him, Churchill barked out an edict banning bureaucratese, legalese, officialese, jargon and other gobbledegook in favour of plain English. To him it was the fastest method of conveying concise, unambiguous messages to command.
As a practising plain English editor and writer, I can assure you this battle is coming at us on many fronts, from the supermarket shelves to our national capital. It is fed by intellectual vanity, fear of looking dumb, pesky lawyers (of course) and a public that has been bludgeoned into submission by its heavy, dull, self-important pedantry. This enemy of clarity and friend of the obscurantist feeds off our numb acceptance of it in our everyday lives.
Speaking of pesky lawyers, here's a sample of something I recently had to turn into plain English for a reluctant law firm: "The conditions of chapters 13 and 14 shall with modifications deemed as necessary extend and apply to and in relation to this Section and others, without affect to the aforementioned in the sense of its generality, in particular with the modification that any reference to plastic or plastic products shall be construed as a reference to rubber products also in full." That's 58 words. My solution was: "What chapters 13 and 14 say about plastic and plastic products also applies to rubber." That's 15 words — say no more!
Just as you can't turn a sow's ear into a silk purse, neither should you be turning nouns into verbs. For those out there who practise these verbal gymnastics, I have "benchmarked" your attainment and have decided not to "calendar" you a meeting so "access" your information on your way out my door before I "task" you a spanking. Mind you, it can sometimes work. For example, US visionary Buckminster Fuller once described God "as a verb not a noun, proper or improper". He saw God as not a thing but a doing word. He was a genius and they are allowed to do say that sort of thing. Mind you, he didn't go on to say "I God you", but you get the drift.
Then there's the buzzword salads that slink across my desk and curl up in the corner, staring their evil stare. Buzzword users like to hide in the vagaries of big words. They use "realise" rather than "do", "facilitate" rather than "make easier", or — my pet hate — "utilise" rather than "use". These jumbled assaults on my beloved English seem designed to intimidate, depersonalise and, I suspect, divert the reader from the fact that the writer does not really have an answer. Scratch the surface and you are in free fall, for these battalions of nothingness often carry no precise meaning. A case in point is the following blast of corporate waffle I was recently asked to edit for plain English as part of an annual report for a finance client: "By analysing and validating strategies moving forward we can better ascertain our total customer satisfaction base and thus better empower our interactive competency team process." In other words: "Closely monitoring strategies teaches us more about customer satisfaction and improves our teamwork."
Not surprisingly, however, it is the bottom-line imperative that will probably drive companies and governments to take up plain English. Recent US research demonstrates that Australian business may be losing as much as $2 billion a year through unclear communication, which equates to about 35,000 jobs. This is based on a US survey of 3000 customers about the promotional material they are emailed and mailed. It was found that up to a third were simply boycotting products that came with bad writing, costing the US economy about $10 billion a year.
However, it's not all bad news as the recent stoush in the US over Facebook's user agreement demonstrates. The company took a public relations belting after the blogosphere raged at it for making changes to its user agreement without notice and without it really being clear what the changes were. The main problem was changes to two sentences that gave Facebook a licence over any content posted on its site even after a user has deleted their profile. In an amazing turn of events for a modern business, Facebook is taking bold steps to recraft its "terms of services" agreement into plain English. If this goes ahead, and if Facebook users start to demand the same plain English language of the other companies, it might set an important precedent for all consumers. After all, real consumer choice doesn't exist unless we can read, understand and then act on information we are presented with. In the words of Albert Einstein, "everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler".
Andrew Pegler is a plain English editor and copywriter.
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