shoes of the reader. Is the meaning clear? Is it expressed directly? Is it interesting to read? How would I feel after reading it? If the answers to any of the first three questions is ‘no’ or even ‘well . . . ’ you should try to face up to rewriting it. Nobody pretends that rewriting isn’t an unwelcome task but the reward is worth it – the satisfaction of having improved upon your first effort. Of course, if you use a word processor the job of rewriting (often sentence by sentence or paragraph by paragraph) is easier.
Thinking before writing will help you avoid clangers like this paragraph from a bank’s letter to a customer:
We will not charge the £19 and £23 fee if your account had an average cleared credit balance of at least £500 during the period we were charging for. If you only pay a charge as a result of a charge you paid in the previous charging period, we will refund this second charge if you ask.
Pardon? Oddly enough, this piece of nonsense bore the Crystal Mark, the seal of clarity approved by the Plain English Campaign, which brings us to the two key organisations in Britain devoted to the elimination of drivel and gobbledegook and the encouragement of clear language and plain English.
The Golden Bull vs the Golden Rhubarb
The self-appointed guardian angel of our national tongue is Chrissie Maher, OBE, founder of the Plain English Campaign. Remarkably, Ms Maher, who was brought up by a widowed mother in a poor household in wartime Liverpool, did not learn to read or write until she was in her teens. The disability dogged her until, during a job interview with an insurance company, she admitted she was illiterate. Instead of rejection she was told she could have the job, provided she studied at night school; three years later she could read, write and count. In her adult life she went on to a degree course in sociology.
A deprived background made Chrissie Maher keenly aware of how uneducated people were fobbed off by officialese they couldn’t understand, and how they were often coerced into signing important documents and forms, with little idea about what the small print meant. When she came across a case in which an old lady died of hypothermia because she couldn’t understand the application form for a home heating grant, she decided to do something about it.
Maher launched the Plain English Campaign in 1979: since then, with its relentless exposure of bureaucratic pomp and absurdity, it has become both feared and admired. It prompted a government review which resulted in some 36,000 official forms being scrapped and another 60,000 rewritten to make them more easily understood. It is frequently hired by organisations to vet their forms and sales literature and issues a ‘Crystal Mark’ to commercial prose which passes its standards of clarity. To transgressors of simple English however, it issues its annual Golden Bull awards. Winners of this trophy – appropriately a pound of tripe – include the Department of Agriculture which defined cows, pigs and sheep as ‘grain-consuming animal units’, a car sales firm which described a used car as a ‘pre-enjoyed vehicle’, and the National Health Service for defining a bed as:
A device or arrangement that may be used to permit a patient to lie down when the need to do so is a consequence of the patient’s condition rather than a need for active intervention such as examination, diagnostic intervention, manipulative treatment, obstetric delivery or transport.
The more recent Plain Language Commission has identical objectives and issues its own annual awards – the Golden and Silver Rhubarb trophies for the year’s most baffling documents.
Both organisations waged a war of blunt words in 1995 when the Commission awarded NatWest Bank a silver trophy for what it called an example of the year’s worst gobbledegook in a booklet about mortgage rates, part of which read:
Depending upon the type of mortgage you have, repaying early can have certain financial consequencies [sic], for instance, early repayment of a mortgage and surrender of an endowment policy, may leave you with a small surrendering sum, which may not reflect the actual monies invested. Alternatively, cancellation of a life policy without considering future needs may ultimately mean increased premiums for the same amount of life cover in the future.
To the embarrassment of the Plain English Campaign, NatWest Bank had just been nominated for its ‘Crystal Clear Bank of Europe’ award for the ‘ease with which its literature could be understood’!
You may wonder, when the experts in concise, coherent communication disagree so profoundly, whether you will ever see the clear light of day through the other side of the jungle. But take heart and read on and you will learn how even the most dense thicket of verbiage can be trimmed and tamed.
If language can be like a jungle sometimes, officialese is the minefield laid among the thorny thickets and clinging creepers. And despite the successes of the Plain English teams, officials in government, local councils and other bureaucratic organisations still too often try to lure us into their baffling word mazes.
The language of officialdom can obliterate all meaning. Feel the undergrowth closing in as you try to fight your way out of this trap dug by the former Department of Health and Social Services . . .
The Case of the Crippled Sentence
A person shall be treated as suffering from physical disablement such that he is either unable to walk or virtually unable to do so if he is not unable or virtually unable to walk with a prosthesis or an artificial aid which he habitually wears or uses or if he would not be unable or virtually unable to walk if he habitually wore or used a prosthesis or an artificial aid which is suitable in his case.
This would-be ‘sentence’ first of all reflects the legalistic terror of official punctuation: the full stop or comma which, if misplaced, might lead the Department all the way to a House of Lords appeal. And, second, it ignores or offends half the population – women – by exclusively using the masculine pronouns he and his.
So let us take our machete to the undergrowth, bring in the mine detectors and wire-cutters, and try to discover what, if anything, this passage struggles to convey. A step at a time, too, for fear of booby traps.
A person shall be treated as suffering from physical disablement . . . treated?
This is not intended as medical advice, but since the context is medical the reader may, however briefly, be confused. Lift out treated and replace with considered. Throw treated into the shrubbery.
Suffering from physical disablement. Why not simply physically disabled? And while we are at it, we don’t need as after considered. Toss that into the shrubbery too.
So far, in our cleaned-up version, we have ‘A person shall be considered physically disabled’ – and we don’t seem to have lost any of the intended meaning.
Such that he is either unable to walk or virtually unable to do so. Wrench away the clumsy such that he is and replace it with which makes him (we’ll come to the offending pronouns later). Next, we cut out either, because we don’t need it.
We now have which makes him unable to walk, or virtually unable to do so. This can be more tightly expressed as which makes him, unable, or virtually unable, to walk.
Peering into the darkening thicket we next tackle if he is not unable
