Past newsletters 2002
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Plain English update 29 November 2002
We were intrigued by a reference to us in this week's edition of 'New Statesman' magazine. An article on medical gobbledygook concludes:
'Interestingly, a consultant colleague recently tried to look up the website of the Plain English Campaign on a hospital computer. As quick as a flash, a message appeared on his screen: 'ACCESS DENIED: ADVOCACY GROUP.' Our mediocrats may be lacking in talent and originality, but they have a sure instinct for survival: they know that plain English and the use of words that have meaning would be a grave threat to their position.'
We know some points can begin to wear thin after a while, so we will simply mention that the Mirror newspaper has renamed Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott the 'Minister for Gobbledygook' and leave it at that.
A charity campaigning for better food and farming has accused manufacturers of misleading customers through food labels.
The row is about the World Health Organisations guidelines suggesting that people eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day. The label on one Heinz product boasts that the tin contains one portion. However, the product is spaghetti and sausage, and the 'portion' comes from the tomato sauce.
Catherine Fookes of the charity Sustain said 'Companies are cynically hijacking the healthy fruit and vegetable message and using it as a marketing tool.' Heinz spokesman Michael Mullen said 'We believe we are being open and honest.'
The Food Standards Agency has issued guidance to make references to 'country of origin' clearer on food labels.
- Terms such as 'produce of', 'product of', 'origin', 'British', 'Scottish', and 'Welsh' should only be used 'where all the significant ingredients come from the identified country and all of the main production/manufacturing processes associated with the food occur within that place or country.' The only exception to this is for 'products, such as chocolate, where certain ingredients (in this case cocoa beans) cannot come from the country in question'.
- With meat, 'single country origin declarations should only be given where animals have been born, reared and slaughtered in the same country. Otherwise, information on each of the countries of birth, rearing and slaughter should be given'. (This does not cover beef or veal, which already have their own rules.)
- If the place of origin of the food is not the same as the place of origin of the primary ingredients, it may be necessary to provide information on the origin of these ingredients. For example, bacon or ham made in Britain using Danish pork should not be described as 'British ham' but could be described as 'Danish pork cured in Britain'.
Solicitor Sandeep Dave, a Campaign supporter in India, writes with the news that his article 'Plain Language in Law' has been published by LLRX, an international legal information site. The article is at:
http://www.llrx.com/features/plainlanguage.htm
There will be no update next week because of our awards ceremony and conference. However, details of all the winners, both good and bad, will be listed on our site at www.plainenglish.co.uk/awards.html on Thursday 5 December (Plain English Day).
If your organisation is doing anything to mark Plain English Day, please let us know as we'd love to mention it in our next magazine.
While we are always happy to welcome new additions to our electronic mailing list (2300 supporters so far), we must admit to being a little sceptical about one request to join.
The address was president@whitehouse.gov - the public e-mail address of George Bush.
We suspect this may be somebody's attempt at humour, but if President Bush is reading, please let us know and we'll gladly keep you posted!
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Plain English update 22 November 2002
BBC 2's Working Lunch had an intriguing story this week which highlighted the drawbacks to 'modern' spelling. The mobile telephone company Phones4U has its website at www.phones4u.co.uk, which is logical enough. Unfortunately a dreaded 'private individual' has purchased the address www.phones4you.co.uk and pointed it towards rival firm Carphone Warehouse. (As part of an 'affiliate scheme', links to Carphone Warehouse can earn money from the firm.)
Those with a preference for literacy will be disappointed to know that the address www.phonesforyou.co.uk is currently in the cyberspace equivalent of a black hole.
We are all familiar with the problem of manufacturers producing 'obvious' statements on labels to deflect potential legal action. But the Guardian reported this week that the American website for Burger King has a statement of the not-so-obvious:
'Burger King Corporation makes no claim that the BK Veggie Burger or any other of its products meets the requirements of a vegan or vegetarian diet.'
From today's Metro newspaper: 'Nato's rapid response unit will be in operation by 2006'.
Lord Woolf has announced the winner of his competition to find an everyday alternative to the Latin term 'pro bono'. Unfortunately the winning entry, 'law for free', will no doubt irritate grammatical purists everywhere.
We originally planned to mention the following piece a few weeks ago, but the relevant weekly update was cancelled through staff illness. However, we felt this story had to get an airing at some stage.
Each year the Turner Prize contest in London brings together the finest examples of conceptual art, usually marked by artists explaining their 'concept' with a stream of waffle. This year, though, visitors to the exhibition had the chance to leave their thoughts on comment cards.
One comment, while hardly meeting Plain English Campaign's guidelines to be human and polite, was certainly unambiguous:
'If this is the best British artists can produce then British art is lost. It is cold, mechanical, conceptual bull****. The attempts at contextualisation are particularly pathetic...'
What made the comments particularly notable was that they were written by Kim Howells: Britain's minister for culture. And who says politicians don't say what they mean?
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Plain English update 15 November 2002
Plain English Day is coming on Thursday 5 December and we have a real woman of words presenting our awards.
She is writer and comedy performer Sandi Toksvig. As well as being a regular guest on 'Call My Bluff' and 'Whose Line Is It Anyway?', she has written plays and children's books.
But the awards ceremony isn't the only thing we are doing to mark Plain English Day.
- A group of teenage Campaign supporters in Liverpool will be testing instructions for popular Christmas gifts.
- And we'll be making the final preparations for our conference, which takes place in London on Friday 6 December, the day after the awards.
We often explain that plain English is about public information, rather then rewriting literature. But horror writer Stephen King seems to apply some of the most important guidelines for crystal-clear writing.
In his book 'On Writing: A memoir of the craft', reviewed by Stephen Wilburs in the Minneapolis Star Tribune this week, Mr King suggests preferring the active voice, avoiding excessive padding and writing with the reader firmly in mind.
A study published this week suggests unclear intranets (a company's internal 'website') could cost an average mid-sized firm around £3 million a year.
The figure, produced by usability expert Jakob Nielsen, is based on wasted staff time and resources. The study involved timing how long it took staff to perform 16 common tasks on their company's intranet, such as looking for a specific piece of information.
If Mr Nielsen is to be believed, if every firm worldwide improved the usability of its intranet to match that of the best-performing examples, the total savings would be around £200,000,000,000!
On a similar note, a British design agency has condemned the clarity of Government websites.
The Interactive Bureau says the biggest problem is that 'Too often masses of material, full of unexplained jargon and convoluted incomprehensible English has simply been dumped into official websites... It leads one to ask what is the point of spending all that money with the aim of bringing Government closer to the people, if the end result is the same forbidding "closed" mentality of officialdom writ larger than ever before?'
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