Past newsletters 2003

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Plain English update 28 February 2003

Last week we mentioned the Foreign and Commonwealth Office having issued new (and certainly unambiguous) advice on travelling to Iraq. This week, the department finished its review of all 209 travel advice notices for countries around the world. Each notice is now written in everyday language and will be reviewed regularly to make sure it is up to date.

New rules will stop soft drink producers from passing off 'squash' drinks as pure fruit juice. At the moment, a loophole allows firms to use concentrated juice and added water to produce 'pure juice'. This is cheaper to produce as the concentrate can be transported on it own and the water added at local firms.

From July, any manufacturer producing fruit juice from concentrate must mention this in the label. The change was prompted by concerns that consumers could buy what they thought was 'pure juice' when it actually contained tap water, which may have been chlorinated.

Consent forms used in clinical trials in the United States are too complicated for most patients according to a new study. The research, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that the average consent form was written at a 10th grade reading level (ages 14 and 15). The average reading age of Americans is thought to be around 8th grade level (ages 12 and 13).

Thanks to reader J. Lee who, having read the 516 word sentence from a mortgage agreement that appears on our website, wrote a 567 word effort in response. (We are printing this as a one-off; please do not take it as a challenge to better Mr Lee's efforts!)

'One afternoon, while I was working on a project about a couple of weeks ago, I remembered some reference that I had heard some time ago, although I am not really sure how long ago it was that I heard it, but I was pretty sure that I had picked that up at one of the Toastmasters meetings sometime after I rejoined because I remember that it was at the Great America Building where we have our regular weekly meetings at the present and it seemed to me that it was possibly our own Randy Harker that had originally throw out this little tidbit of information, about how there was a sentence that was something like 80 or 90 words in a row that made up one long sentence that was alleged to be completely grammatically correct, that I ended up surpassing in a recent email to a client that was explaining an arrangement for file sharing on an intricate web site development project that I was handling, which led me to believe that I had broken the record but without validation to back it, I admit I was skeptical, but I figured it should not be a problem at all for someone like me, who can be very long winded at times, to compose a sentence that should easily surpass such a record of only 100 words and so I decided not to worry about my record which included more words than the cited record holder, which as far as I knew at the time was only 90 words or so but needed to be verified by research, which prompted me to do just that, some researching, which included an email over to good ol' Randy who, although he did not remember offering such information at any of the club meetings, he did a little research of his own on long sentences and in the process of researching the longest sentence in English record, during which he happened to turn up a link for me that included some grammatical reference material on a web site that featured an example statement that held the record as far as they know, which had a mind boggling 516 words, that turned out to be an excerpt from some highly technical, and very long, very winded, and profoundly complex contract from some sort of rental agreement, like maybe a property management and landowner acquisition form, or sale contract, or something like that, which ended up posted on a European website by some grammatical institution that cites, as an example of what not to do grammatically, the aforementioned reference to the excerpt from that overly worded and extraordinarily long winded statement that made up a more modest looking record holding in by a thread with the mere 516 words of its one single sentence that seemed to trail on and on and on forever, yet never seeming to make an actual point about anything that the average person could decipher by using what very little common knowledge that most people have about such long and confusing verbiage about very confusing matters which can require a lot of time just to try to translate so you can maybe understand anything that it is trying to explain to you about whatever the intended purpose of the whole contract or agreement or whatever it was, was supposed to be about in the first place.'

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Plain English update 21 Feburary 2003

As you may have read, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) have been trying to improve the clarity of their Travel Advice notes. These brief notes tell British citizens about any safety or security issues that they need to know about when travelling to a particular country. Staff from Plain English Campaign recently visited the FCO to share some of our experience in writing clear but authoritative documents.

Judging from the recently revised Travel Advice note for Iraq, it seems the FCO have started as they mean to go on:

'You should not attempt to visit Iraq. We advise any British nationals already there to leave immediately. We are giving this advice because of the increasing regional tension and of the risk of terrorist action. If you are considering going to Iraq, you should be aware that British nationals were used as hostages during the 1990 to 1991 crisis by the Iraqi regime, being held where their safety was at most risk. You should also be aware that there is no British diplomatic presence in Iraq to offer consular assistance.'

To celebrate this week's launch of the Penguin Dictionary of Business, Radio 5 Live asked several business figures for their least favourite piece of business jargon. Perhaps as a sign of the times, most of those asked chose euphemisms for redundancy, including:

• rightsizing;
• de-hiring;
• trimming fat; and
• creating payroll orphans.

The following passage is taken from a 'Police Perfomance Monitoring' report published through the Home Office this week. It's worth reading through again and again until the magical moment when suddenly it all becomes clear.

'For each force, Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabularies (HMIC) has determined a set of 'most similar forces', which have similar social and geographic characteristics to the force in question. These characteristics are considered to be relevant to policing. By making a comparison with this set of forces (rather than all forces), the performance of the force in question is put into context and like-with-like comparisons can be made.

'For this reason, the average shown on each monitor (as the edge of the blue pentagon) is not the national average, but rather the average taken only over the group of HMIC most similar forces. A list of these forces is given alongside each monitor. It is important to realise however, that just because one force is 'most similar' to a second force, this does not mean that the second force is most similar to the first force: the second force may actually be closer in character to a third force. (See box, below, for an analogy).

(The box contains three dots joined together and the words 'Point B is closest to point A, but point A is not the closest to point B. Point C is in fact the closest point to B. By analogy, whilst B is in A's group, A is not in B's group but C is.')

'For example, one of the 'most similar' forces to a metropolitan force might be an urban force rather than a rural constabulary. However, the urban force might be 'most similar' to other urban forces rather then the metropolitan force.

'Thus, for 43 police forces there are actually 43 different groups of 'most similar' forces. The consequence for monitors is that each monitor is plotted against a different average, although the monitors are almost all scaled to ensure that the average (shaded pentagon) appears the same on each one. In absolute terms, this means that one monitor cannot be directly compared with another, although the relative performance of forces against their appropriate averages can be compared between monitors.'

Financial firms may have to give information in plain English. A consultation paper from the Financial Services Authority proposes rules specifically calling for plain English.

The paper, which runs to a less-than-concise 276 pages, suggests the existing 'Key Features Document' that accompanies financial literature should be replaced by a document called 'Key Facts'.

The proposed rules, which are scheduled to take effect in July, say:

'A firm must take reasonable steps to ensure that all text is in clear, easily understood language, following the principles of plain language.

'A firm should draft a key facts document as an informative rather than a technical document. Follow the principle of 'less is more'. This is not a document intended to communicate the full terms and conditions of a product to the customer. The content should properly describe the contract but the document should not overload the customer with too much detail.'

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Plain English update 17 February 2003

Russian citizens who love slang and foreign expressions can once again do so without fear of breaking the law. The country's council (upper house of parliament) has overturned a law that banned writers from using such expressions. The speaker of the council, Sergey Mironov, pointed out that the country's constitution would need thirty amendments to meet the new rules!

The National Consumer Council has warned that voluntary food labelling schemes are more likely to confuse and mislead consumers rather than inform them.

The consumer group has been looking at the many logos and claims on food packaging which are not legally required. Their research suggests many such labels are designed to make products stand out from one another, with the result that consumers do not understand what the majority of the labels and logos mean.

They have published a report, 'Bamboozled, Baffled and Bombarded', which calls for:

• a guide to good practice in food labelling, developed by the Food Standards Agency in partnership with manufacturers;
• consistent definitions for claims such as 'vegetarian' or 'healthy'; and
• clear rules for endorsement schemes, including making manufacturers explain any financial arrangements behind such schemes.

No doubt many of our readers have come across baffling error messages when visiting web sites that no longer exist. We came across an intriguing one this week. The news that 'This Web page could not be opened with the specified browser request. Please try again later.' was clear enough. But we were baffled to discover that we had suffered a '590 Unchunk Failure'.

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Plain English update 7 February 2003

Our place in British culture had another boost this week during an episode of BBC2's 'University Challenge'. Host Jeremy Paxman asked students 'Which pressure group was founded by Chrissie Maher in 1979?' Fortunately for us, they correctly answered 'Plain English Campaign'. But the contestants got the first follow-up question wrong when they failed to name our annual prize for a baffling quote (the Foot in Mouth award). And, when given the quote.

'When it comes to words I have a uniqueness that I find almost impossible in terms of art - and it's my words that actually make my art quite unique', the contestants did not know it was by artist Tracey Emin, and instead blamed our old friend John Prescott!

We have added a new option to our range of on-line courses. 'Introducing business writing' is a brief look at

• parts of speech;
• sentences and paragraphs; and
• different types of business writing.

The course costs £25 and is designed particularly for businesses looking to polish the skills of new recruits. It's also a good option for anyone who wants a 'taster' of our on-line courses before committing to the more intensive Plain English or Grammarcheck courses.

You can read more at www.plainenglishtraining.com.

The King's Fund, a health charity, has published a new guide, 'Producing Patient Information'. The guide covers the entire process, from developing an information policy through to the different forms of paper and electronic production. It also includes Plain English Campaign guidelines for clear medical information.

For more details of the guide, which costs £20, you can visit www.kingsfund.org.uk or call 020 7307 2568.

The language of the Internet gets ever more confusing. Apparently some less scrupulous e-mailers are now using terms such as 'H4xOr' (hacker) and 'war3z' ('wares', or illegal copies of software) to avoid being caught out by companies that filter out any messages containing the conventional spellings. According to The Times, the technique is now being used by teenagers to deliberately exclude those who are not computer experts.

Even more bizarrely, it seems ordinary letters are too 'mainstream' for some users. Instead they write |/\| instead of M, /< instead of K and |) instead of D.

Whether anybody using such techniques actually has something worth saying is still a mystery.

Also from the Times comes this somewhat cynical suggestion for the European Union's 'constitution' (which is under debate at the moment):

'Article 15: status of constitution

'The European Union notes that though some member states believe that the Union should have a written constitution, other members states believe that a constitution can be unwritten and therefore resolves that the unwritten portions of this constitution shall have equal force with the written, provided that the constitution shall be equally incomprehensible in any language of any member state.'

Russian citizens will have to mind their language after the state duma (parliament) outlawed swearing and slang. They also banned expressions taken loosely from English, such as 'biznes', 'menedgment' and 'mirchandizing'. But, reports the Guardian, the law is largely symbolic. The new offences will only lead to a fine of between 25 pence and one pound, or up to two months of community service.

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