The Gazette 1985

SEPTEMBER 1985

GAZETTE

and conditions but that an extension of value or amount exceeding 20% of the original contract price or £100,000 (whichever is the lesser) shall be subject to the approval of the appropriate special sub-committee'. At first we converted this to: 'The appropriate officer can extend contracts on their original terms and conditions unless the extension is by more than 20% of their original price or £100,000. The appropriate special sub- committee can approve extension above the limits.' This took only 36 words against 50 in the original. It was obviously an improvement and, technically, it was absolutely watertight. Most people said we needed the phrase 'whichever is the lesser' but this would have been tautologous, not to say saying the same thing twice. However, our version was not plain English because it was capable of being misunderstood. Some clown would have extended a contract worth £50,000 by £90,000 and conveniently disregarded the 20% rule. To be accurate and grammatically correct is not enough. Your words must not be capable of misinterpretation by even the laziest reader. We should have spotted the word 'unless' as a danger signal. It indicates a negative construction and that's always perilous. Eventually we decided on: 'The appropriate officer can extend contracts up to £500,000 on their original terms and conditions by anything up to 20% of their original price. 4 He can also extend contracts over £500,000 on their original terms and conditions by anything up to £100,000. 'The appropriate special sub-committee can approve extensions beyond these limits.' This takes 52 words, slightly more than the original and many more than our first version, but at least the meaning is crystal clear. In conclusion, writing plain English is an extremely time-consuming business. Although our final efforts may not look particularly awe-inspiring, they did take a dedicated team of people four drafts and 160 man hours to produce. We laboured, on average, for about five minutes over every word. It's not an easy task, indeed I think plain English preachers haven't made enough of the difficulties facing people in unscrambling our language. There are, however, a few basic ground rules which I have set out and illustrated in this paper. The real key to writing plain English successfully, I believe, is to do it as a team. One person working in isolation, unless he or she is immensely talented and persevering, cannot hope to succeed. You need others to work with you, to challenge your drafts and to take over when you begin to flag. This necessarily demands flexibility and enthusiasm from all the professionals involved, including lawyers who, I have happily discovered, are just as capable of these qualities as ex-journalists such as myself but go about it a bit more quietly. My final piece of advice to any new convert anxiously waiting to tread the plain English road is to remember to

settle for nothing less than perfection as you see it. Once you begin to compromise over the basic ground-rules then you will be in trouble. Like the civil servants who wrote the draft I referred to earlier, you may be marginally improving on what had gone before but you will be falling far short of the pinnacle of plain English. The pay-off is that once you write plain English, it works. People understand it and sometimes they even express gratitude for your work. We had a memo from our principal architect, whose section often uses our revised document, congratulating us on 'an excellent job and one long overdue'. Plain English also cruelly exposes loopholes which have been previously obscured by legalese. Some of the loopholes we found had not even been spotted by the council's assistant city solicitor until we started on our exercise. For Bradford Council there has been a literal pay-off as well: we have already sold our plain English version to more than 20 councils at £25 a time, and have more than recouped the costs of the exercise. The Council have now commissioned us to rewrite all the regulations on contracts worth less than £15,000 and all the procedural rules on council debates in the coming municipal year! • PRIVATE DETECTIVE INVESTIGATIONS Retired Sergeant f r om An Ga r da Siochana in Dublin with thirty years "Exemp l a r y" Service Certificate (including seven years in Detective Branch and last three years of service in Criminal Intelligence Section), with vast experience in all related areas, is now available for Private Investigations in all departments.

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