Past newsletters 2002
We have a substantial archive of newsletters which are available using the links below. To search for news items using keywords or phrases, please use the search box on the left hand side of the page.
Newsletters
| 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 |
Plain English update 28 March 2002
An old communication problem has earned a new name. New Scientist magazine has coined the term 'semiopathy' for the situation where a reader misinterprets an ambiguous sign.
Examples include:
- 'Police Club Visitors';
- 'extra thick baby wipes';
- 'attract men with larger breasts'; and
- 'Slow Children Crossing'.
And before anyone writes in, we are quite happy to admit that our campaign is both plain and English!
back to top
Plain English update 22 March 2002
A parliamentary committee has rejected a Government regulation for being written in gobbledygook.
The Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments (regulations that do not need to go through the full parliamentary process to become laws) refused to approve a proposed education rule.
The committee said the regulation was 'drafted in an unnecessarily complex and obscure way' and asked the Government to consider whether the rules 'could have been expressed more simply and clearly'.
It appears this is the first time a statutory instrument has been held up for this reason.
Our A to Z of pension terms has been included in a new guide to company pension schemes.
'Reviewing your Company Pension' is written by Stephanie Hawthorne, editor of Pensions World magazine. It is aimed at firms that need straightforward advice on running schemes for their employees.
The book describes our A to Z as 'an intelligent and intelligible glossary'.
An Australian lawyer has appealed to our supporters to help find a publisher for his thesis on ambiguities in legal writing.
One judge said publishing the thesis would be 'a significant contribution to the development of legal thinking.... [and] to the improvement of the drafting of statutory material.' The thesis includes a chapter on the use of clear and precise language.
If any of our readers can suggest somebody who might help, please contact us and we will pass on the details
We often advise people writing to the public to imagine how they would speak if the reader was sitting across the desk from them. Unfortunately this policy does assume the writer has a reasonable level of politeness. In the case of one councillor, this proved to be a problem.
Salford Councillor Audrey Judge replied to a home owner who had written to protest at an increase in his Council Tax.
She began 'Thank you for your sad unsolicited letter that I accept in the knowledge that while you are having a go at me, you are leaving everyone else alone.'
After detailing the council's performance, she wrote 'I live in hope that you will become a kinder person and desist from writing patronising letters.'
Her letter concluded 'PS. Just a thought - what a perverse little man you are.'
Perhaps Ms Judge should read through our tips on writing letters in plain English, which conclude 'Write sincerely, personally, in a style that is suitable and with the right tone of voice.
back to top
Plain English update 15 March 2002
One of the most common concerns among our supporters is the need for plain English in wills. We get many calls and letters from people who are frustrated because they cannot get a solicitor to prepare a will that they can understand. There is some irony here because a will is the one situation where the person signing the document cannot clarify any confusion when the document comes to be used.
To try to prompt more clarity in wills, we have produced 'The plain English guide to wills', a free guide on our website .
The guide includes:
- a glossary explaining common terms used in wills;
- an explanation of what happens when somebody dies without leaving a valid will (intestacy); and
- three examples of how wills could be written in plain English for straightforward situations.
The guide is not intended to be a 'how to' manual, but rather to give people a starting point to make sure they can be confident their will reflects their intentions. If nothing else, people should be able to express their wishes in plain English and have a solicitor apply legal jargon where strictly necessary, rather than have the solicitor start with a sludge of legalese before begrudgingly simplifying the language.
As always with our guides, we welcome any corrections or suggestions, particularly from the legal profession.
New research suggests more than a billion pounds worth of benefits go unclaimed by pensioners each year.
The survey by insurance firm Prudential blamed confusion and complexity in the benefit system, covering Council Tax Benefit, Housing Benefit and income support.
Of those questioned, 23% had never heard of the benefits, while another 43% did not realise they were eligible.
The Government has calculated that literacy and numeracy problems cost British businesses £5 billion a year. The figure comes from people that either spend longer on a task, or cannot perform it, because of difficulties with 'basic skills'.
Chancellor Gordon Brown is expected to announce a scheme in next month's budget by which firms will get tax credits if they allow staff to take time off to improve their literacy and numeracy skills.
The recent much-publicised collapse of energy firm Enron may prove to be a blow against gobbledygook in the United States.
President George Bush has asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to require companies to release quarterly reports detailing their financial states in 'plain English'. The intention is to give investors clearer information when they decide whether to buy or sell shares.
Finally we have a correction from last week's update. While several newspaper sketch writers touched on John Prescott's intriguing linguistics in Parliament, our extract from Simon Hoggart's account was of course from the Guardian and not the Times. We apologise for any suggestion Mr Hoggart had changed either his employer or his politics!
With so much support in the House of Lords for the fight against gobbledygook, we may have to introduce a 'Plain English Peer' award. If we did, the latest candidate would be Lord Phillips of Sudbury. Speaking against a particularly unclear clause in a proposed law, his passion for clarity was crystal clear.
'At first sight it looked gobbledegook; at second sight it looked an abortion; at third sight I was boiling with lawyerly rage. I was boiling with lawyerly rage because I am making a serious point with these two amendments. It is not enough for the Committee to say that this is a technical matter and that this is a technical amendment. Human beings have to interpret the statutes that we leave them with, and the danger in this House and the other place is that, week by week and year by year, we enter into legislation that is so alien in its language and so complex in its execution that the ordinary citizen of this land is left totally at a loss.
'I hope the Committee will not think that I am getting too embroiled in a small matter, but we must put a stop to this kind of language.'
back to top
Plain English update 8 March 2002
A couple of years ago we heard about a survey that claimed seven out of ten workers in Britain would prefer a grander sounding job title to a pay rise. We were sceptical, but it seems employers were listening.
A survey this week showed two-thirds of those questioned believed their bosses had adopted the practice of 'uptitling' ? awarding job titles in place of increased pay.
The survey also showed that job titles being used in British firms include:
- optical illuminator enhancer (window cleaner);
- regional head of services, infrastructure and procurement (caretaker); and
- head of verbal communications (receptionist).
We would be just as sceptical of these findings were it not for our 1997 Golden Bull Award to a supermarket advertising for an 'ambient replenishment controller'. In plain English, a grocery shelf-stacker.
It's hardly a secret that some advertisers use vague terms to describe the virtues of their products and services. But this week, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) argued that one firm's interpretation of a phrase was not what the public would expect.
A travel firm, Great Experience Days Limited, claimed to be 'the UK's No.1 Experience Company', arguing the phrase referred to the quality of the service. But rival firm Red Letter Days Limited, said they were the true 'No. 1' firm because they had the most sales. The ASA agreed with Red Letter Days Limited's interpretation.
Sometimes we suspect our supporters believe we set out to make fun of John Prescott's contributions to the art of clear communication. Honestly, we don't. It's just that so many reports of his performances in Parliament are just so cruel, so biting... and so entertaining.
This is from Simon Hoggart in the Times this week.
'Then he started talking. Heavens, he was fast. Words tumbled over each other, one after the other, in no evident order, sometimes unconnected to the words which went before.
'A Prescott answer resembles a cattle stampede. There are hundreds of words penned up in his brain. Then one sees a break in the fence and runs for it. The others rush in, terrified of being left behind. Soon the words are scattered on the prairie and no one can round them up.'
While this is not strictly to do with plain English, we thought that the following letter from the Daily Mail might amuse the writers among you:
'As a lawyer I have often been accused of being able to argue that black is white, and I have finally succeeded in doing so by using the thesaurus on my word processor.
'Starting with the word black and successively replacing the previous text with a suggested meaning or synonym, the sequence runs: black, dark, unlit, dim, dull, colourless, pale, bleached, white.
'Alan Field, Greenford, Middlesex.'
Even the tax experts agree that self-assessment forms are too complicated. Speaking recently the president of the Chartered Institute of Taxation (CIOT), John Whiting, referred to figures showing that one in ten of those who complete the form miss the deadline for returning it to the Inland Revenue.
'The fact that some 10% of the Inland Revenue's customers could not comply with their basic responsibilities is telling. We think that the time has come for proper research into the reasons for so many people failing to meet their responsibilities.'
The CIOT suggested the reasons include 'complexity, poor communication and perception of tax'.
The problem isn't exclusive to Britain though. A change to the tax return in the United States, where a greater proportion of people complete such forms, has led to confusion.
The change to the form is intended to explain the rules about rebates from the Government following the latest tax cuts. Unfortunately the explanation has not worked perfectly and the Internal Revenue Service (the United States tax authority) has received more than a million forms with mistakes related to this change.
back to top
Plain English update 1 March 2002
The following comes from Martin Waller's diary column in the finance section of the Times newspaper.
'Morgan Stanley has taken months overhauling its rating system for shares. 'We think the jargon of buy and sell is misleading,' says Dennis Sheal, head of global research. So in come overweight, equal-weight and underweight - all of which sounds suspiciously like buy, hold and sell.'
Credit companies in Britain have agreed new guidelines to avoid confusion over interest rates.
The existing system meant each firm provided an 'Annual Percentage Rate' (APR) figure in their adverts. This represents the total cost of keeping a loan for twelve months, and is designed to allow easy comparison of different lenders.
The changes mean firms that offer a specially reduced introductory rate that only applies for a short time cannot describe that rate as an APR. For example, some firms do not charge any interest for the first six months of a loan that has been transferred from another lender.
The change comes as the Government is looking at other possible ways to make loan information clear such as standardising the way different firms work out their APRs.
Sometimes it can be difficult to tell whether or not somebody is speaking waffle. Take the case of internet company Freeserve who this week appeared to deny rumours of a price rise.
Contacted by internet news site 'The Register' for a comment, a spokesperson replied 'If ever we decide to adjust our prices - up, down, sideways, back to front, in yen, Euros or dollars - our customers will know about it from us, and that's the way it should be.'
We don't usually take much notice of fictional accounts of gobbledygook. After all, the real thing is usually much scarier. However, we did find the following piece eerily plausible.
It is taken from 'e-male', a weekly column in the Financial Times telling the story of one man's manic life in management, told through a series of e-mails.
We suspect the author writes from bitter experience...
'From: Help.Desk@a-bglobal.com on 25/02/02
To: All.Staff/London@a-bglobal.com
We are currently experiencing problems with one of our servers. To ameliorate this we are in the process of creating a recover server environment.
To sufficiently isolate the recovery server from other Exchange servers in the production organisation, all users must install Active Directory as the root of a separate forest. It may also be necessary to configure the recovery server as a Domain Name System (DNS) server is the corporate DNS server's permissions model denies you the rights to create necessary service records in it.
I assume this solves any problems.
Phil Wade, Chief Help Desk Strategist.'
back to top
|
