Why Plain English is better

Weaselly recognised

Posted by Stan Carey on June 01, 2011

Last week I wrote a parody of corporate communication as part of a competition for Macmillan Dictionary’s Business English month. Enjoyable as it was to write, I had even more fun reading the responses – readers’ translations of my imperfect storm of management buzzwords. The comments showed how naturally people see through (and play with) this kind of language, even when it borders on incomprehensibility.

It is satisfying to replace officialese and ‘corporatese’ with more direct and meaningful words, to use our creativity – whether mentally or in a more concrete way – to improve vague and inflated guff. But gobbledegook remains all too customary in business and politics, and the inexorable creep of commercialisation and politicisation means that it is apt to end up almost anywhere. It seems to spread partly by contagion; in all but the most careful speakers, passive exposure can lead to use.

Fortunately there are efforts in the other direction, promoting plain language. For example, President Obama recently signed into law the Plain Writing Act of 2010, which obliges federal agencies in the U.S. to use “clear Government communication that the public can understand and use”. In 2009, the Local Government Association in the UK listed 200 words and phrases to avoid. Although the LGA clearly meant well, some of the words it blacklisted were useful, and some of the alternatives it suggested were little or no improvement on the undesirable jargon.

My parody article obscured the act of firing people. This act can be a regrettable economic necessity during a prolonged credit crunch, but euphemising it with periphrasis and weasel words like rightsizing, downsizing, offshoring, strategic reorganisation, involuntary career realignment or decruitment implementation event doesn’t make anyone feel better about it. On the contrary: it demeans and irritates people. It pushes their irritation buttons.

Plain English is a frank and straightforward style that does not lend itself readily to expressing longwinded nonsense and hiding unpleasant facts. It is well suited to conveying meaning clearly and without guile, thereby showing a measure of respect for people’s intelligence, feelings, and capacity for dealing with difficult truths and situations – not “challengeful reality-based outcomes, going forward”. Our brains do a lot of hard work decoding language into sense; in business, it doesn’t pay to multiply this workload.

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Out with gobbledygook, in with Plain English

Nails on a blackboard: legalese and management-speak

Posted by Briony Drimie on May 19, 2011

Business English month continues with a guest post on legal English and management-speak.

_________

My relationship with Business English began at university, where I studied Law. From legal summaries involving sentences that spanned over a hundred lines to words that I remain convinced were made up on the spot, the use of language depended entirely on which side of a case was argued. Legal language was my introduction to the fact that language could be less about clear communication and be more of an art form, clarifying or obfuscating points of law in order to sway an argument.

Despite being considered overly wordy, lawyers are very caught up in individual words, for the definition of a word, or indeed its absence in a sentence can be the pivotal point of a case. By example, one of the first cases students are taught is that of Adler v George. The law stated it was an offence to obstruct HM forces “in the vicinity” of a prohibited place. The defence argued that the defendant was innocent as he was “in” a prohibited place when he obstructed HM forces and not in the vicinity of it. The Judges didn’t agree but it goes to show how a case can hinge on a single word.

Legal language contains many phrases rooted in Latin that define specific legal concepts, such as mens rea or habeas corpus which have evolved as part of the legal process. These phrases don’t mean anything to many of us but they perform a necessary function within Law and are in their own way precisely defined. As such, I can easily tolerate their use in a professional context.

However, upon moving from Law to corporate business, I discovered that there was a vein of Business English I had been protected from: what we commonly know as management-speak, which I have loathed since I first heard it. It reached a head several months ago, when a man I’d never spoken with suggested that he “hit my imagination button”.

I have no issue with the use of metaphor in speech. However, within the business industry, usage seems to have spiralled out of control. Some management-speak phrases grate more than others: a friend of mine loathes “singing from the same hymn sheet” whilst I find “speaking with one voice” irritating. Equally, I find “going forward” problematic. Forward refers to distance and is inappropriate in referring to time. Particularly when phrases such as “in the future”, “from now on”, “soon”, “shortly” “imminently” and “at the earliest opportunity” are all viable alternatives.

A prevailing irritation is the curse of the noun-as-a-verb, leading to “transitioning into a new team” or “incentivating the workforce”. I find these nouns-as-verbs to be the linguistic equivalent of nails on a blackboard. These sentences are clunky and could be expressed in a cleaner way. For example, someone could “move” to a new team or “give” staff an incentive.

In an age when more of our business is conducted internationally and we have language barriers to cross, isn’t it time to promote Plain English?

Source: http://www.macmillandictionaryblog.com/legalese-and-management-speak

Need for Plain English

Take big, wonderful and startling ideas and make them comprehensible

You've got metaphor, analogy and imagery at your disposal, and a lexicon that would be the envy of Shakespeare. Tim Radford reveals the secrets of good science writing

Shakespeare deployed around 30,000 different words. Biology alone has added 60,000 new words to the language. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty

Science writing would be easy if it were not for two problems: the ideas and the words. The ideas are quite often either counterintuitive, unimaginable or just very difficult (think special relativity, cosmic inflation, dark matter, quantum states, epigenetics or almost anything to do with cell biology) and the words are unfamiliar, misleading or simply hostile: how many non-scientists do you know who instantly understand what you mean by an alpha particle, a sodium ion channel, a phenotype or Mesozoic?

The ideas, however, are also part of the delight. Science writers get the chance to compose sentences that have never been written before. How many poets, sports reporters or political correspondents ever have that privilege?

But the words really are a problem. In the first place, there are an awful lot of scientific words. According to a casual aside in a Nature review two years ago, biology alone has added 60,000 new words to the Oxford English Dictionary. Shakespeare composed all his sonnets, plays and poems with a lexicon of little more than 30,000 words.

Some scientific words are coinages, some of them are existing words with new meanings, and some of them represent ideas that are as freshly minted as the words themselves: that is, they are not in a dictionary at all.
So a science writer has at some point to become a translator; to convert science into journalism without, if possible, using journalese; to take big, wonderful and startling ideas and make them comprehensible with help from metaphor, analogy and imagery, but if possible without using the hand-me-down language of cliché. So that rules out the missing link, the Holy Grail, the magic bullet and Pandora's Box for a start.

To be of any use, a science writer has to deliver something that does not necessarily induce apoplexy in his scientifically trained readership, but at the same time keeps the lay reader glued to the text. This has its own dangers: science isn't simple, but newspaper paragraphs and news bulletin scripts have to be vivid, clear and headlong – in a word, simple, with few asides for proviso or caveat.

Bloggers have the luxury of the optional hyperlink, but they too must write something that will bring their fans back to the web page. In a 450-word account of palaeontological discovery, biomimetic experiment or exoplanet identification, the science writer must navigate between the rock of scientific rigour and the hard place of Ben Goldacre's Bad Science column.

Why go to all that trouble? Alas, science journalism is not a take-it-or-leave it activity. Science is funded by the public, for the public good: in a democracy, journalists have an obligation to report on scientific advance, however baffling. So the hapless hack must decide what the story is, and then write it.

A writer's first duty is always to the reader (without a reader, who says you are a writer?) but unless what you write is also right, why bother? So as Albert Einstein is supposed to have once said, in what I have always imagined was advice to science journalists: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."

Thanks Albert. You've been a big help.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2011/apr/13/secrets-good-science-writing

Most confusing sentence - WE NEED PLAIN ENGLISH

The hardest sentence in the tax code

Apr 20th 2011, 21:06 by R.L.G. | NEW YORK

AMERICA'S tax-filing season ended Monday; accountants are still sleeping it off and ordinary Americans just glad the ordeal is over for another twelve months, even those who got a refund. Tax-filing is extraordinarily complicated in America, despite the country's reputation as low-tax and libertarian in things economic. This is why both of the (otherwise radically different) deficit plans of Barack Obama and Paul Ryan, a congressman, call for simplifying the code.

And so speaking of confusing statutes, via Going Concern, an accounting blog, I found this New York Times citation of section 509(a), "legendary as the most difficult sentence to understand in the tax code."  Are you ready for it?

For purposes of paragraph (3), an organization described in paragraph (2) shall be deemed to include an organization described in section 501(c)(4), (5), or (6) which would be described in paragraph (2) if it were an organization described in section 501(c)(3).

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