Plain Words Page 5

The third is that it should be further diluted by attributing decisions and opinions to ‘the Department’:

  The Department has (or have) considered your application and does (or do) not think you have made out a case.*

  The fourth is that responsibility should be assigned to a quarter mystically remote by the use throughout of the impersonal passive:

  Your application has been considered and it is not thought that you have made out a case.

  This is neither sympathetic nor natural.

  I cannot pretend to be an authoritative guide on the comparative merits of all of these approaches (no doubt every department makes its own rules), but there are three further points that seem to me important.

  First, in letters written in the first person be careful to avoid giving the impression that you are an all-powerful individual signifying your pleasure. If the letter grants what is asked for, do not say that you are making a ‘concession’. If it refuses a request never say, as in the example given, I do not think you have made out a case. You should imply no more than that it is your duty to decide how the case before you fits into the instructions under which you work.

  Second, it is a mistake to mix these methods in one letter unless there is good reason for it. If you choose an impersonal method, such as ‘the Department’, you may of course need to introduce the first person in order to say something like ‘I am glad to tell you that the Department has …’. But do not mix the methods merely for variety, saying I in the first paragraph, we in the second, the Department in the third and it is in the fourth. Choose one and stick to it.

  Third, do not use the impersonal passive at all—with its formal unsympathetic phrases, it is felt, it is regretted, it is appreciated and so on—otherwise you will seem to your correspondent more like a robot than a human being. How feeble this sentence is: ‘It is thought you will now have received the form of agreement’, compared with: ‘I expect that by now you will have received the form of agreement’.

  (5) Be careful to say nothing that might give the impression, however mistakenly, that you think it right that your correspondent should be put to trouble in order to save you from it. Do not ask for information a second time that you have asked for and been given already unless there is some good reason for doing so; and if there is, explain the reason. Otherwise you will make it seem as though you think it proper that your correspondent should have to do what is perhaps quite a lot of work to save you the effort of turning up a back file. Do not use the phrase Date as postmark. This will be read by many recipients as meaning: ‘I am much too important and busy a person to remember what the date is or to put it down if I did. So if you want to know you must pick the envelope out of the wastepaper basket, if you can find it, and read the date on the postmark, if you can decipher it. It is better that you should do this than that I should be delayed in my work for even a moment’.

  Note. The phrase Date as postmark may be less popular now than it was when Gowers wrote this, but it does survive in bureaucratic writing, especially on printed matter destined to be posted without a covering letter. ~

  (6) Use no more words than are necessary to do the job. Superfluous words waste your time, waste official paper, tire your reader and obscure your meaning. There is no need, for instance, to begin each paragraph with a phrase like I am further to point out, I would also add, or you will moreover observe. Go straight to what you have to say without striking a precautionary note, and then say it in as few words as are needed to make your meaning plain.

  (7) Keep your sentences short. This will help you to think clearly and will help your correspondent to take your meaning. If you find you have slipped into long sentences, split them up. This sentence is a long one:

  If he was not insured on reaching the age of 65 he does not become insured by reason of any insurable employment which he takes up later, and the special contributions which are payable under the Act by his employer only, in respect of such employment, do not give him title to any health benefits or pension, and moreover a man is not at liberty to pay any contributions on his own account as a voluntary contributor for any period after his 65th birthday.

  This sentence contains three statements of fact linked by the conjunction and. Because this is its form, no reader can be quite sure until reading beyond the ands whether any of these statements has been completed. Only in re-reading the sentence will many people pick up the statements one by one. If they had been separated by full stops (after later and pension) and the and s omitted, each statement could have been grasped at first reading. The full stops would have seemed to say: ‘Have you got that? Very well, now I’ll tell you something else’.

  (8) Be compact. Do not put a strain on your reader’s memory by widely separating parts of a sentence that are closely related to one another. Why, for instance, is this sentence difficult to grasp on first reading?

  A deduction of tax may be claimed in respect of any person whom the individual maintains at his own expense, and who is (i) a relative of his, or of his wife, and incapacitated by old age or infirmity from maintaining himself or herself, or (ii) his or his wife’s widowed mother, whether incapacitated or not, or (iii) his daughter who is resident with him and upon whose services he is compelled to depend by reason of old age or infirmity.

  The structure of the sentence is too diffuse. The reader has to keep in mind the opening words all the way through. The last point explained is that a deduction of tax may be claimed ‘in respect of any person whom the individual maintains at his own expense and who is his daughter’, but his daughter is separated from who is by no fewer than thirty-two words. In a later leaflet of income tax instructions, the same sentence was rewritten to run as follows:

  If you maintain a relative of yourself or your wife who is unable to work because of old age or infirmity, you can claim an allowance of … You can claim this allowance if you maintain your widowed mother, or your wife’s widowed mother, whether she is unable to work or not. If you maintain a daughter who lives with you because you or your wife are old or infirm, you can claim an allowance of …

  Why is the new version so much easier to grasp than the old? Partly it is because a sentence of eighty-one words has been split into three, each making a statement complete in itself. But it is also because a device has been employed that is a most useful one when an official has to say, as an official so often must, that such-and-such a class of people who have such-and-such attributes, and perhaps such-and-such other attributes, have such-and-such rights or obligations. The device is to say: if you belong to such-and-such a class of people, and if you have such-and-such attributes, you have such-and-such a right or obligation (that is, the device is to use conditional clauses in the second person instead of relative clauses in the third). The advantage of this is that it avoids the wide separation of the main verb from the main subject. The subject you comes immediately next to the verb it governs, and in this way you announce unmistakably to your reader: ‘I have finished describing the class of people about whom I have to tell you something, and I shall now say what that something is’.

  (9) Do not say more than is necessary. The feeling that prompts you to tell your correspondent everything when you give an explanation is commendable, but you will often be of more help if you resist it, and confine yourself to the facts that make clear what has happened.

  I regret however that the Survey Officer who is responsible for the preliminary investigation as to the technical possibility of installing a telephone at the address quoted by any applicant has reported that owing to a shortage of a spare pair of wires to the underground cable (a pair of wires leading from the point near your house right back to the local exchange and thus a pair of wires essential for the provision of service for you) is lacking and that therefore it is a technical impossibility to install a telephone for you at …

  This explanation is obscure partly because the sentence is too long, partly because the long parenthesis has thrown the grammar out of gear, and partly b
ecause the writer, with the best of intentions, says far more than is necessary even to make what is said here seem thoroughly polite and convincing. It might have run thus:

  I am sorry to have to tell you that we have found that there is no spare pair of wires on the cable that would have to be used to connect your house with the exchange. I fear, therefore, that it is impossible to install a telephone for you.

  (10) Explain technical terms in simple words. You will soon become so familiar with the technical terms of the law you are administering that you will feel that you have known them all your life, and may forget that to others they are unintelligible. Of this fault I can find no English example to equal the American one already quoted:

  The non-compensable evaluation heretofore assigned to you for your service-connected disability is confirmed and continued.

  This means, I understand, that the veteran to whom it is addressed has been judged to be still not entitled to a disability pension.

  I am indebted for the following example to a friend in the Board of Inland Revenue, who also supplies the comment:

  I have pleasure in enclosing a cheque for £ …, a supplementary repayment for … This is accounted for by the fact that in calculating the untaxed interest assessable the interest on the loan from Mr X was treated as untaxed, whereas it should be regarded as received in full out of taxed sources—any liability thereon being fully satisfied. The treatment of this loan interest from the date of the first payment has been correct—i.e. tax charged at full standard rate on Mr X and treated in your hands as a liability fully satisfied before receipt.

  ‘The occasion was the issue of an unexpected cheque,’ writes my friend. ‘It is a difficult matter to explain, and an honest attempt has been made. The major fault is one of over-explanation in technical language. The writer could have said:

  The interest you received from Mr X on the money you lent him was included as part of your income to be taxed. This was wrong. Mr X had already paid tax on this interest, and you are not liable to pay it again. You have been repaid all the tax due to you.

  With this the recipient would have been satisfied. “Treated in your hands as a liability” is an odd way of describing an asset, and the loan was of course to Mr X, not from him. “Interest-on-the-loan” is treated confusingly as a composite noun.’

  (11) Do not use what have been called the ‘dry meaningless formulae’ of commercialese. Not all of them need warning against: officials do not write your esteemed favour to hand or address their correspondents as your good self. But some of these formulae do occasionally appear. Same is used as a pronoun,* enclosed please find is written instead of I enclose, and foolish begs are common. The use of beg in commercialese is presumably to be accounted for by a false analogy with the reasonable use of I beg as a polite way of introducing a contradiction, I beg to differ meaning ‘I beg your leave to differ’. But there is no reason why one should apologise, however faintly, for acknowledging a letter or remaining an obedient servant.

  Avoid, too, that ugly and unnecessary symbol and/or when writing letters. It is fit only for forms and lists and specifications and things of that sort. It can always be dispensed with. Instead of writing (say) ‘soldiers and/or sailors’ we can write ‘soldiers or sailors or both’.

  Note. And/or is not fit even for ‘specifications and things of that sort’ unless used with care. When it is thrown into the middle of the confounding phrase ‘regardless … or not’ it becomes positively boggling, as the Department for Communities and Local Government demonstrates in one of its attempts to explain current planning law to the public:

  With all building work, the owner of the property (or land) in question is ultimately responsible for complying with the relevant planning rules and building regulations (regardless of the need to apply for planning permission and/or building regulations approval or not). ~

  Do not allow per to get too free with the English language. Such convenient abbreviations as mph and rpm are no doubt with us for good. But generally it is well to confine per to its own language, e.g. per cent, per capita, per contra, and to avoid writing ‘as per my letter’ for ‘as I said in my letter’. Even for phrases in which per is linked to a Latin word, there are often English equivalents that serve at least as well, and possibly better. ‘£100 a year’ is more natural than ‘£100 per annum’, and per se does not ordinarily mean anything more than ‘by itself’ or ‘in itself’. Another Latin word better left alone is re. This is the ablative case of the Latin word res. It means ‘in the matter of’. It is used by lawyers for the title of lawsuits, such as ‘In re John Doe deceased’, and has passed into commercialese as an equivalent of the English preposition about. It has no business there, or in official writing. It is not needed either in a heading (‘re your application for a permit’), which can stand without its support, or in the body of a letter, where an honest about will serve your purpose better.

  A correspondent has sent me the following example of the baleful influence of commercialese:

  Payment of the above account, which is now overdue at the date hereof, appears to have been overlooked, and I shall be glad to have your remittance by return of post, and oblige.

  Yours faithfully,

  The superfluous at the date hereof must have been prompted by a feeling that now by itself was not formal enough and needed dressing up. And the word oblige is grammatically mid-air. It has no subject, and is firmly cut off by a full stop from what might have been supposed to be its object, the writer’s signature.

  The fault of commercialese is that its mechanical use has a bad effect on both writer and reader—the writer’s appreciation of the meaning of words is deadened, and the reader feels that the writer’s approach lacks sincerity.

  (12) Use words with precise meanings rather than vague ones. As we have seen, you will not be doing your job properly unless you make your meaning readily understood: this is an elementary duty. Yet habitual disregard of it is the commonest cause of the abuse and raillery directed against what is called officialese. All entrants into the Civil Service come equipped with a vocabulary of common words of precise meaning adequate for every ordinary purpose. But when the moment arrives for them to write as officials, most have a queer trick of forgetting these words and relying mainly on a smaller vocabulary of less common words with a less precise meaning. It is a curious fact that in the official’s armoury of words the weapons readiest to hand are weapons not of precision but of rough and ready aim. Often, indeed, they are of a sort that were constructed as weapons of precision but have been bored out by the official into blunderbusses.* The blunderbusses have been put in the front rack of the armoury. The official reaches out for a word and uses one of these without troubling to search in the racks behind for one that is more likely to hit the target in the middle.

  The blunderbuss integrate, for instance, is now kept in front of join, combine, amalgamate, coordinate and others, and the hand stretching out for one of these gets no further. Develop blocks the way to happen, occur, take place and come. Alternative (a weapon of precision whose bore has been carelessly enlarged) stands before many simple words such as different, other, new, fresh, revised. Rehabilitate and recondition are in front of others, such as heal, mend, cure, repair, renovate and restore. Involve throws a whole section of the armoury into disuse, though not so big a one as that threatened by overall. And rack upon rack of simple prepositions are left untouched because before them are kept the blunderbusses of vague phrases such as in relation to, in regard to, in connection with and in the case of.

  It may be said that it is generally easy enough to guess what is meant. But you have no business leaving your reader to guess, even though the guess may be easy. That is not doing your job properly. If you make a habit of not troubling to choose the right weapon of precision you may be sure that sooner or later you will set your reader a problem that is past guessing.

  (13) If two words convey your meaning equally well, choose the common one rather
than the less common. Here again official tendency is in the opposite direction, and you must be on your guard. Do not say regarding, respecting or concerning when you can say about. Do not use advert instead of refer, or state, inform or acquaint when you might use say or tell. Inform is a useful word, but it seems to attract adverbs as prim as itself, sometimes almost menacing. In kindly inform me the politeness rings hollow; all it does is to put a frigid and magisterial tone into your request. Perhaps you will inform me means that you have got to inform me, and no ‘perhaps’ about it, and I suspect the consequences may be serious for you. Furthermore is a prosy word used too often. It may be difficult to avoid it in a cumulative argument (moreover … in addition … too … also … again … furthermore) but choose one of the simpler words if they have not all been used up. Do not say hereto, herein, hereof, herewith, hereunder, or similar compounds with there, unless, like therefore, they have become part of the everyday language. Most of them put a flavour of legalism into any document in which they are used. Use a pronoun and perhaps a preposition instead. For instance:

  With reference to the second paragraph thereof. (With reference to its second paragraph.)

  I have received your letter and thank you for the information contained therein. (For the information it contains.)

  I am to ask you to explain the circumstances in which the gift was made and to forward any correspondence relative thereto.

  (Any correspondence about it.)

  To take a few more examples of unnecessary choice of stilted expressions, do not say predecease for die before, ablution facilities for wash basins, it is apprehended that for I suppose, capable of locomotion for able to walk, will you be good enough to advise me for please tell me, I have endeavoured to obtain the required information for I have tried to find out what you wanted to know, it will be observed from a perusal of for you will see by reading.