The Gazette 1985

GAZETTE

SEPTEMBER 1985

Plain English

by Tony Whiting*

P LAIN English is rather like virtue. We are all firmly in favour of it. Again, like virtue, it is easier to preach than to practise. Today, there are more enlightened people — lawyers, civil servants and consumer groups — preaching the use of plain English than ever before. As a member of a working group which turned 3,600 words of legal jargon into 1,800 words of plain English, I must confess to sharing their proselytising zeal. But what I feel my counterparts have failed sufficiently to convey is the genuine difficulty many people have in writing plain English. Their spirits may be willing — indeed this is a prerequisite if anyone is to write plain English — but once started on the daunting task they can soon fear they lack the techniques. My aim in this article is to recognise and sympathise with the feeling and to suggest some ways forward based on my own experience. The first thing I should say is that although I have been a press officer for Bradford Metropolitan Council for four years I was a journalist for eight years before that, and it is my years as a reporter on a string of provincial papers, rather than as a desk-bound local government bureaucrat, that have helped me to write plain English. Not that I believe journalists are exemplary practitioners of the plain English art: they should be but, all too often, they are not. Hand-me-down journalistic clichés, not necessarily plain, everyday words, are their stock in trade. For example, one might read in a newspaper: 'Hundreds of engineering workers face the axe, a company chief warned today 1 . How many times do you hear people in bus queues saying: 'Our Fred is facing the axe. He was warned by a company chief today'. They would be much more likely to say: 'Our Fred might lose his job. His manager told him today'. This 'bus queue' version is plain English. It uses simple, well-known words and is capable of being understood at once by the most stupid reader. The journalist's version is a corruption of it, but perhaps still more acceptable than an excessively legalistic interpretation much favoured by lawyers. A local government solicitor, asked to express the sentiments in a report, for example, might have written: 'It was confirmed today by the managing director of an engineering concern that the probability rather than the possibility is in existence that several hundred operatives in a local engineering concern may have their employment terminated under the provisions of redundancy legislation in the none-too-distant future'. Whichever version you read, journalist's or lawyer's, you have mentally to unscramble it to reduce it to the 'bus queue' version. The more words there are, the more complicated the constructions used in the sentence, the more difficult it is. The real advantage of my background in journalism is that I talked to lots of people in bus queues. I hadn't lost touch with the way ordinary people speak all the time, which, incidentally, is very little different from the way in which professional people such as lawyers (and perhaps * Reprint from Gazette of Law February, 1984.

journalists?) speak most of the time when they are not playing word games designed to outwit or outsmart colleagues. There is, then, no magical property to plain English. It can be seen and heard in bus queues and pubs the length of the land. The problems seem to be, first, convincing people that the directness of the bus queue is acceptable, and secondly, helping them to express themselves in this way through the use of certain techniques if they feel unsure of their own abilities. Standing Orders To illustrate what I have been saying I am going to take as an example a set of rules which local councils must follow whenever they seek tenders for contracts worth more than £15,000. They are known as 'standing orders for contracts' and, although there is scope for a little variation here and there to take account of special local factors, in general they follow a broadly similar pattern set out by the Department of the Environment. In Bradford I was recently in a team of people which included the assistant city solicitor, a librarian and six literacy field-workers who were working on a 'plain English' version of these standing orders. Our enterprise, incidentally, sprang from a complaint by the deputy leader of the Labour Group, a British Telecom Engineer and never a man to call a telephone 'a handset for the purpose of communication', that these rules were gobbledegook. He was right. They were extremely difficult for laymen to follow, very off-putting in their presentation and actually in places very sloppily written. They needed a thorough revision and, charged with infectious enthusiasm for the job ahead, we set about our task with a tremendous burst of energy. Unknown to us at that time, another group of people were also revising these standing orders: civil servants at the Department of the Environment who were preparing a new model draft for all local councils. The results of their labours emerged just a couple of months after ours and, without being too unkind, I think they indicate the difficulties faced by intelligent people in writing plainly. I don't wish to condemn unfairly what they have done in any way. They have made considerable improvements on the old draft from which we were working, in particular in bringing regulations up to date and in reordering them in a much more logical way. But, whilst welcoming these improvements, they have failed, in my view, to make any real impact on reducing the level of the language from that of the ivory tower to that of the bus queue. Perhaps I should have been warned not to expect too much by glancing through the covering letter accompanying the new draft. Part of it read: 'Attention is drawn in the model to the requirements of EEC Directives. In this connection it should be noted that these requirements must be complied with in all cases where Society of England and Wales, 15 253