Strictly English: Part Two
In the second of four extracts from his book instructing us on the correct way to write English, Simon Heffer takes on contemporary jargon
Some groups of people – state officials, academics, lawyers, certain breeds of scientist – talk to each other in a private language. Some official documents make little sense to lay people because they have to be couched in an argot that combines avoidance of the politically incorrect with obeisance to the contemporary jargon of the profession. Some articles written by academics in particular are almost incomprehensible to those outside their circle. This is not because the outsiders are stupid. It is because the academics feel they have to write in a certain stilted, dense way in order to be taken seriously by their peers.
Many officials seem to have lost the knack of communicating with people outside their closed world. Some academics, however, are bilingual. If asked to write for a publication outside the circle – such as a newspaper – they can rediscover the knack of writing reasonably plain English. They do not indulge themselves in such a fashion when they write for learned journals.
There are certain phrases that they feel obliged to use: positing a thesis always goes down well, for example, where most of us would simply assert or argue or, in a radical move, say. One example of this will suffice to make the point. It is from an American psychology journal:
"Human behaviour is a product both of our innate human nature and of our individual experience and environment. In this article, however, we emphasise biological influences on human behaviour, because most social scientists explain human behaviour as if evolution stops at the neck and as if our behaviour is a product almost entirely of environment and socialisation. In contrast, evolutionary psychologists see human nature as a collection of psychological adaptations that often operate beneath conscious thinking to solve problems of survival and reproduction by predisposing us to think or feel in certain ways."
It is almost as though the purpose of such writing is not to be clear: that the writer is recording research in order to prove to peers or superiors that he has discovered something.
What is important is that others do not think it is somehow clever to emulate them. Academia – however clever its inhabitants are supposed to be – seems the constituency most resistant to the notion of clarity being the most desirable aspect of writing. The example above is not unusual or extreme. Its long words, scarcity of punctuation, abundance of abstracts and even the odd tautology (“innate human nature”) suggest to me that little care was taken in trying to communicate what we must be sure are important ideas. Were I the sub-editor on whose desk this piece of prose landed, and it was my job to turn it into comprehensible English, I should need a stiff drink and a lie down before even trying.
This obscurity is not a vice confined to academics. Creative types tend to have their own languages too, which add to the aura of pretentiousness and self-regard that such people are reputed to have around them. I found the following on the website of Daniel Libeskind, the celebrated architect, about his designs to extend the Military History Museum in Dresden: “The wedge cuts through the structural order of the arsenal, giving the museum a place for reflection about organised conflict and violence. This creates an objective view to the continuity of military conflicts and opens up vistas to central anthropological questioning.”
Few people will have any idea what much of that means. The ideal style is one comprehensible to any intelligent person. If you make a conscious decision to communicate with a select group, so be it: but in trying to appeal to a large audience, or even a small one that you wish to be sure will understand your meaning, writing of the sort exemplified here will not do. This sort of writing used to be kept from the general public thanks to the need to find someone to publish it. The advent of the internet means that one is no longer so shielded from its pernicious effects as one used to be; and such accessibility and ubiquity threaten to have a pervasive effect on the soundness of the language and its susceptibility to corruption.
Next week: the dangerous language of tabloid exaggeration
Strictly English: the Correct Way to Write… and Why It Matters by Simon Heffer (Random House, £12.99 T £11.99) is published on September 9
Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/7966297/Strictly-English-Part-Two.html
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