Plain Words Read online

  The official must use the written word for many different purposes. In Parliamentary Bills, Statutory Orders and other legal documents, precision is so important that these constitute a class apart with which this book is not concerned: the next chapter forms a brief digression to explain more fully why. But there are many other classes of official document—despatches to Her Majesty’s representatives abroad, reports of commissions and committees, circulars to local authorities and similar bodies, departmental instructions, minutes, and correspondence with other departments and with the public, as well as documents explaining the law to the millions for whom, beyond ordering their daily lives in countless ways, it now creates complicated personal rights and obligations—and when writing any of these the object of the official must be the same: to make the reader understand what is meant as readily and precisely as possible.

  II

  A Digression on Legal English

  Even when the counsel in chambers is merely ‘advising on a case,’ or drawing up a conveyance of property, he is really thinking of what view the court and its judges will take of his advice or his draftsmanship if any dispute arises upon them … The supreme test in every case is: ‘Will this stand the scrutiny of the court?’

  Stephen’s Commentaries on the Laws of

  England, 17th edition (1922)

  The obtrusive gracelessness of legal English arises from the necessity of being unambiguous, and that is by no means the same as being readily intelligible. On the contrary, the nearer you get to the one the further you are likely to get from the other.

  The reason why certainty of meaning must be the paramount aim in legal drafting is clear enough. Legal documents impose obligations and confer rights, and neither the parties to them nor those who draft the documents have the last word in deciding exactly what those rights and obligations are. That can only be settled in a Court of Law on the words of the document; but words, with their penumbra of meaning, are an imperfect instrument for expressing complicated concepts with certainty. It is the duty of all who draft these authoritative texts to try to imagine every possible combination of circumstances to which their words might apply and every conceivable misinterpretation that might be put upon them, and to take precautions accordingly. When drafting, they must limit by definition words with a penumbra dangerously large, and amplify with a string of near-synonyms words with a penumbra dangerously small. They must eschew all pronouns when their antecedents might possibly be open to dispute, and circumvent every potential grammatical ambiguity. They must avoid all graces, and not be afraid of repetitions, while all the time keeping an eye on the rules of legal interpretation, and on the case law that concerns the meaning of particular words. No one can expect pretty writing from anyone thus burdened.

  The peculiarities of legal English are often used as a stick to beat the official with. An example of this is the following, by an evening-paper gossip-writer, about a Bill just introduced in Parliament:

  It is written in that abominable civil service jargon, which is as stiff, heavy, lumbering and ungraceful as a wheelbarrow being pushed through sodden clay … It would be a Herculean task to teach the Civil Service to write its own language creditably.

  That the style of Bills, Statutory Orders and other such documents has peculiarities cannot be denied, but if it is jargon*—an arguable question—its species is the legal not the official. It is written by lawyers, not by civil servants (in the sense in which the critics use the term), and its peculiarities arise from causes exactly opposite to those of the peculiarities alleged against ordinary officials. Those of the one come from a desire to convey a precise meaning; those of the other—so it is said—come too often from a reluctance to convey any meaning at all.

  I do not mean to imply that there is no room for improvement in the drafting of statutory documents; but such writing is prudently left to a specialised branch of the Civil Service, and therefore falls outside the scope of this book. It is more a science than an art; it lies in the province of mathematics rather than of literature, and its practice needs long apprenticeship.*

  The only concern of ordinary officials is to learn to understand legal English, to be able to act as interpreters of legal English to ordinary people, and to be careful not to let it taint their own style of writing, a subject to which we will return.

  III

  The Elements

  This then is Style … essentially it resembles good manners. It comes of endeavouring to understand others, of thinking for them rather than yourself—of thinking, that is, with the heart as well as the head … So, says Fénelon … ‘your words will be fewer and more effectual; and while you make less ado, what you do will be more profitable’.

  QUILLER-COUCH, On the Art of Writing, 1916

  Having thus cleared the decks, we can return to the various other purposes for which official writing has to be used. In the past it consisted mostly of departmental minutes and instructions, interdepartmental correspondence, and despatches to governors and ambassadors. These things still have their places, but in volume they must have been left far behind by the vast output now necessary for explaining the law to the public. An immense quantity of modern social legislation and innumerable statutory controls have been necessitated by the war and its consequences. Yet members of the public are still supposed to know the law without being told, and ignorance is no excuse for breaking it. That was all very well in the days when ordinary citizens had little more concern with the law than an obligation to avoid committing the crimes prohibited by the Ten Commandments; no niceties needed explaining to them then. Today, however, our daily lives are conditioned by an infinity of statutory rights and obligations. Even if the laws that define them were short, simple and intelligible, the number of these laws alone would prevent most people from discovering by their own study what they all were.

  The official must be the interpreter. Now this is a task as delicate as it is difficult. An official interpreting the law is looked on with suspicion. It is for the legislature to make the laws, for the executive to administer them, and for the judiciary to interpret them. The official must avoid all appearance of encroaching on the province of the Courts. For this reason it used to be a rule in the Civil Service that when laws were brought to the notice of those affected by them, the actual words of the statute must be used. In no other way could officials be sure of escaping all imputation of putting their own interpretation on the law. Here, then, we have a dilemma. If the official is tied to the words of the law, and if, as we have seen, the words of the law in order to be precise are less than readily intelligible, how is the ordinary person to be helped to understand it?

  No doubt much can be done by selection and arrangement, even though the words used are those of the Act. But the official finds it more and more difficult to give helpful explanations other than by departing from them. And something even more than that is needed to carry out the exhortation given by a President of the Board of Trade to his staff: ‘Let us get away entirely from the chilly formalities of the old-style correspondence which seemed to come from some granite monolith rather than from another human being’. The old rule is indeed yielding to the pressure of events. A new technique is being developed for those pamphlets and leaflets that are necessary to explain the law to the public in such matters as PAYE and National Insurance. Its guiding principles are to use the simplest language and avoid technical terms; to employ the second person freely; not to try to give all the details of the law relevant to the subject but to be content with stating the essentials; to explain, if these are stated in the writer’s words and not the words of the Act, that they are an approximation only; to tell members of the public where they can find fuller information and further advice; and always to make sure that people know their rights of appeal. This technique is being closely studied, in the departments concerned, by experts who have nothing to learn from me.

  But there is another part of this subject: the answering of letters from correspondents
about their own cases. These answers cannot be written, like pamphlets and leaflets, by people who are experts both in the subject matter and in English composition, and here I shall have some advice to give. A letter of this kind needs in some respects a special technique, but the principles of this technique are the same as those of all good writing, whatever its purpose. We have here in its most elementary form—though not on that account its least difficult—the problem of writing what one means and affecting one’s reader precisely as one wishes. If therefore we begin our study of the problem of official English by examining the technique of this part of it, that will serve as a good introduction to the rest of the book, for it will bring out most of the points that we shall have to study more closely later. It is in this field of an official’s duties more than any other that good English can be defined simply as English that is readily understood by the reader. To be clear is to be efficient. To be obscure is to be inefficient. Your style of letter-writing is to be judged not by literary conventions or grammatical niceties but by whether it carries out efficiently the job you have been paid to do.

  This ‘efficiency’ must be broadly interpreted. It connotes a proper attitude of mind towards your correspondents. They may not care about being addressed in literary English, but they will care very much about being treated with sympathy and understanding. It is not easy nowadays to remember anything so contrary to all appearances as that officials are the servants of the public; but they are, and no official should foster the illusion that it is the other way round. So your style must not only be simple, but also friendly, sympathetic and natural, appropriate to one who is a servant, not a master.

  Let us now translate these generalities into some practical rules.

  (1) Be sure you know what your correspondent is asking before you begin to draft your reply. Study the letter in front of you carefully. If the writing is obscure, spare no trouble in trying to get at its meaning. If you conclude that the person who wrote it meant something different from what is actually on the page (as it may well prove) address yourself to the meaning and not to the words, and do not be clever at your correspondent’s expense. Adapt the atmosphere of your reply to suit that of the letter you have received. If its tone is troubled, be sympathetic. If it is rude, be especially courteous. If it is muddle-headed, be especially lucid. If it is stubborn, be patient. If your correspondent is helpful, be appreciative. If you find yourself convicted of a mistake, acknowledge it freely and even with gratitude. And never let the flavour of the patronising creep in as it did into this letter received by a passenger who had lost a railway ticket:

  In the circumstances you have now explained, and the favourable enquiries made by me, I agree as a special case and without prejudice not to press for payment of the demand sent you … and you may consider the matter closed. I would however suggest that in future you should take greater care of your railway ticket to obviate any similar occurrence.

  Follow the admirable advice given in an instruction by the Board of Inland Revenue to their staff, ‘that we should try to put ourselves in the position of our correspondent’, for then we ‘shall speedily detect how unconvincing our letters can seem, or how much we may be taking for granted’.

  (2) Begin by answering the question. Do not start by examining relevant law and practice, only gradually leading up to a statement that explains how this applies to the case in hand. By doing so you keep your correspondent on tenterhooks and risk causing such befuddlement that your answer is lost. Give the answer briefly and clearly at the outset, and only then, if explanation is needed, begin your explanation. Thus your correspondent will know the worst, or the best, at once, and can choose whether or not to skip the explanation.

  (3) So far as possible, confine yourself to the facts of the case you are writing about, and avoid any general statement about the law. If you do make statements about the law, you are likely to face this dilemma: that if you want to be strictly accurate you will have to use technical terms and legal diction that your correspondent will not understand, yet if you want to be simple and intelligible you will have to qualify your statement so copiously with hedging phrases like normally, ordinarily, in most cases and with some exceptions, that you will give the impression of keeping something up your sleeve and not being frank in what you say.

  (4) Avoid a formal framework, if you can. This is a difficult subject, and those who supervise correspondence of this kind are still groping for a satisfactory standard practice. How are we to ‘get away from the chilly formalities of the old style’?

  Over the years when the ‘old style’ became set, official correspondence consisted mostly of interdepartmental communications. The stock formalities in these letters served as reminders that, for present purposes, both the official who wrote a letter and the official who received it were in themselves things of naught; they merely formed a conduit along which the thoughts of their political chiefs might be exchanged. It is no doubt proper that officials and the public should be reminded at all turns that ministerial responsibility is the keystone of our democracy. But however appropriate a formal style may still be in certain circumstances, it will not do for the sort of letter we are now concerned with. It is too flagrantly unreal, besides militating against the spirit of friendliness that we have seen to be desirable.

  There are two difficulties. One is how to start. The other is to whom to attribute the sentiments, opinions and decisions that the letter contains. As to the first, everyone’s inclination is to follow tradition at least to the point of beginning with In reply to your letter of, or With reference to your letter of. That brings us to our first difficulty: how are we to go on?

  In detail the possibilities are infinite, but the main forms are few. ‘I have (or “I am”) to inform you’ used to be the most common. But it is unsatisfactory, not to say silly, with its mysterious suggestion of some compulsion working undisclosed in the background. ‘I beg to inform you’ will not do. ‘In reply to your letter … I wish to inform you’ (which I have seen) is crushingly stiff. This is almost like saying I would have you know. The passive ‘you are informed’ has an aloofness that ought to rule it out. There is the device of plunging straight into saying what you have to say without any introductory words. But this will not do as a continuation of In reply to your letter. What is in reply to the letter is not the information but the giving of it. (It is nonsense to say, ‘In reply to your letter of (date), the income tax law on personal allowances has been changed’.) I regret to inform you and I am glad to inform you will do nicely when there is anything to be glad or sorry about, but that will not always be the case.

  Must we then conclude that we ought to abandon the standard opening In reply to your letter unless we find we can continue naturally with I am glad to tell you, or I am sorry to have to tell you, or some such phrase? Perhaps. Nothing would be lost, and there are plenty of other ways of beginning that will not lead us into this mire. But if we turn versions of In reply to your letter into a full sentence we shake off our difficulties.

  This must be done with discretion. Some attempts are unfortunate. For instance:

  Your letter is acknowledged, and the following would appear to be the position.

  Receipt of your letter is acknowledged. It is pointed out …

  Here is the inhuman passive. A better way of saying what these two were trying to say is ‘Thank you for your letter. The position is (or the facts are) as follows …’. Or again, in this example,

  With reference to your claim. I have to advise you that before the same is dealt with …

  there is no need to start with an ejaculatory and verbless clause. All that was needed was to begin: ‘Before I can deal with your claim’. I believe that a common formula during the war was:

  Your letter of (date) about so-and-so. We really cannot see our way …

  I am told that this is fortunately dying out, perhaps because it is becoming less difficult to see our way. Another not very happy effort is:

&n
bsp; I refer to recent correspondence and to the form which you have completed …

  There is a faint air of bombast to this: it vaguely recalls Pistol’s way of talking (‘I speak of Africa and golden joys’). Probably ‘Thank you for the completed form’ would have been an adequate opening.

  There are, however, many possible ways to do the job of In reply to your letter or With reference to your letter that make a complete sentence without getting the writer into trouble.

  Thank you for your letter of (date).

  I have received your letter of (date).

  I am writing to you in reply to your letter of (date).

  You wrote to me on such-and-such a subject.

  I have looked into the question of such-and-such, about which you wrote to me.

  All enable you to continue by saying what you have to say as a direct statement, with no unfriendly preliminaries like I would inform you.

  There remains the second question. To whom are you to attribute the opinions and decisions which, having got over the initial hurdle, you then proceed to deliver? There are four possibilities. To illustrate them, let us take what must today be a common type of letter, one turning down an application. The first of them is that the letter should be written in the first person, and that the official who signs it should boldly accept responsibility:

  I have considered your application and do not think you have made out a case.

  The second is that responsibility should be spread by the use of the first person plural:

  We have considered your application and do not think you have made out a case.