How to beat the bafflegab
Simplicity is a virtue, especially when it comes to writing. We look at initiatives both near and far to rid the workplace of jargonese
The invaluable word gobbledygook didn’t enter our dictionaries until 1944, but “wordy and unintelligible jargon” had existed quite plentifully long before that. Once a mere nuisance, strangled language has now become such a major international issue that it requires the efforts of a special unit within the European Union to cope with it.
What seems extraordinary is that it took the European Commission so long to recognise the problem and do something about it. The EU issued a guideline in 1998, “resolved, that acts shall be drafted clearly, simply and concisely”. Easier said than done. Given the viewpoints of 27 strong-minded nations and their jealous devotion to the 23 EU languages, arriving at a consensus on how best to achieve clarity is a daunting task.
The use of bureaucratese is an addiction that’s hard to get rid of. Speaking at the Conference on Clear Writing organised by the European Commission in Brussels in November 2010, Commissioner Androulla Vassiliou admitted that familiarity with EU affairs breeds contempt for clarity. It’s bad enough when limited to internal documents, but “we allow the same style of writing to infect our publications and our websites. No wonder many of our readers find the EU dull and obscure!”
And that’s not all. Sloppy writing wastes time and money. It creates extra work for the small army of translators who have to make sense of the original before they can turn it into sensible Danish, Greek, Hungarian or any one of the other official EU languages. Speaking as an editor for the Directorate-General for Translation (DGT), Eva Kaluzynska made the point forcefully when she said that “clear language is not a luxury, but essential for democracy to function”.
To relieve the burden on translators, the Commission’s Clear Writing Campaign is calling on the makers of software designed to help writers and editors produce leaner and cleaner copy. StyleWriter is only one of these ingenious applications (‘authoring tools’) that point a ghostly finger at mistakes of grammar, syntax and spelling while criticising your style if it finds it too vague or longwinded.
Examples of opaque writing abound. A recent example was the radical revision of a disclaimer posted in the coaches of the South African Gautrain rapid rail service. The Before version was an example of long, detailed, hard-to-follow legalese; the After version was perfectly understandable, if somewhat alarming in that the text seemed to absolve the company of responsibility for anything that might happen to passengers or their luggage. The rewrite team ran the train company’s streamlined message below the heading ‘WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE’.
Which is often the point. When it is not mere clumsiness, the purpose of obscure wordage may be to prevent the reader from noticing the sly ambiguities in the text and understanding it only too well. Prominently posted in the lobby of a multi-star hotel was the neatly lettered sign: “In our endeavour to ensure guest safety at all times, can visitors please note that fire bell testing is carried out every Monday at 9.30am.” When the Campaign revisionists were through with it, the sign read: “We test the fire bell every Monday at 9.30am.”
That we the readers are assaulted on all sides by words is a fact of modern life we can do nothing about, but it would help if more of them were intelligible. It surely tells us something when we learn that DGT has a staff of 2,500 people to turn the Commission’s laws, policy papers and reports into readable material for us all. Quality suffers from too much quantity.
Lawyers who believe in clear language instead of legalese (there are such people) banded together in 2002 to form Clarity, an international association devoted to creating a revolution in communication: straight-talking legal documents. A speaker at Clarity 2010 in Lisbon, its fourth biannual conference, came up with the startling statistic that “a weekday edition of The New York Times has more data than the average person in 17th-century England would encounter in a lifetime.”
Perhaps we should put in a kind word for the writers who are paid to create these mountains of verbiage. They are only putting down on paper or the internet what the compulsive talkers and lawmakers in the European Parliament have concluded. These linguistically gifted drudges need all the help they can get when it comes to conveying the wisdom of their superiors. Which is where the DGT Clear Writing Campaign comes in. To begin with, they have produced an amusingly illustrated 16-page pamphlet called unambiguously, How to Write Clearly or Rédiger clairement or Duidelijk Schrijven or Jak Pisac Zrozumiale or Skriva Klarsprak as the case may be.
This little vade mecum is full of perhaps obvious but too easily forgotten tips on how to purge your prose of the dread gobbledygook or bafflegab. Tactfully called Hints, their 10 recommendations begin with the admirable: Think before you write. Who are your readers? They are colleagues, outside specialists and the general public.
Hint #4 is the notorious KISS, or Keep It Short and Simple, which really says it all. This means uncluttering your document of such irritating redundancies as ‘as is well known’, ‘in view of the fact that’, ‘and so on and so forth’. Hint #9 deals with those risky false friends (faux amis) of language that betray such misunderstandings as “Luxembourg is not an important country” when the writer only meant to say it’s a small country (important does not always mean ‘important’).
Clear, simple and concise should never mean impoverished. In his dystopian novel 1984, George Orwell coined the term Newspeak to describe the reduction of language to a drastic minimum where synonyms and adjectives are abolished by law. That’s not what the Editing Unit of DGT has in mind. A Commission-wide survey carried out in 2009 found that 86 percent of respondents agreed that Eurojargon was still a serious problem. It takes many staffers working under pressure of tight deadlines and coping with last-minute changes to produce a not always coherent document. Part of the trouble is that 95 percent of the drafters always or often write in English when only 13 percent of them have it as their mother tongue. Mistakes are unavoidable.
But help is on the way. Anyone at the Commission who is not sure of a text or feels that it could be improved in some way can send it to DGT for editing. If a document that comes your way still has traces of Commissionese in it, you can ask for ‘linguistic revision’ by a native speaker of any official language. Errors and confusion will always creep in, but with the creation of the Clear Writing Campaign there is now a bracing new spirit of vigilance abroad.
Keep it simple
Copies of How to Write Clearly are available in all EU languages at ec.europa.eu/translation
