265 / 406
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