Past newsletters 2003

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Plain English update 26 September 2003

You may remember a couple of months ago our founder Chrissie Maher wrote to several newspapers to raise the issue of references to salt on food labelling. She's all smiles this week because the Government has announced a 'salt summit' for leading food manufacturers and supermarkets. A spokesman for Public Health Minister Melanie Johnson said that firms may be forced to print 'high in salt' warnings on labels where appropriate. Ministers may also tackle the confusion caused by the way recommended daily allowances are stated as an amount of salt, but food labels list sodium. (There is one gram of sodium in every 2.55 grams of salt.)

As much as we detest needlessly complicated instructions, sometimes writing can be a little too plain. An e-mail to junior schools in Greater Manchester this week read as follows.

'Urgent: carrots have been delivered this week. The recommendation from the Department of Health is to wash them, eat them from the bottom, discard the top.'

Radio presenter John Humphrys has condemned 'management-speak' in the introduction to a new book. Writing in 'Between You and I, A Little Book of Bad English' by James Cochrane, Mr Humphrys says 'It is an outrage that the phrase 'human resources' was not strangled at birth. A moment's thought tells you that 'resources' are exploited, used up, squeezed for every last drop of value and then replaced. Are we really meant to regard human beings in that light?' The Today presenter, who hosted Plain English Campaign's annual awards in 2001, added 'It is silly to imagine that this evolution can be halted. But that is different from hoisting the white flag and surrendering to linguistic anarchy.'

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Plain English update 19 September 2003

Several people have sent us the following paragraph this week.

'Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is that frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.'

It's an interesting party trick, though it's telling that we've seen the 'research' attributed to several universities depending on which version of the e-mail we received!

What the 'story' doesn't say is that it only works for words you are familiar with. If the paragraph contained any unfamiliar jargon, it would be far more difficult to make sense of it. And for anyone who has English as a second language, or has general reading difficulties, it is very difficult to quickly decipher the words from their context.

The paragraph also shows why language can be misinterpreted - there is always a danger that readers will misread a word because they have already subconsciously 'filled in the blanks'. Rudolf Flesch (the man behind the 'Flesch test' for readability that you may see when you check your spelling and grammar in Microsoft Word) once admitted to misreading a word in a history book:

'I was pulled up wide awake by a word that simply didn't belong in Toynbee. The word was 'horseradish'.... My eyes had encountered 'heresiarch' (a leader of heretics), a word I had never seen before, and had conveyed to my mind the only word I knew that could possibly produce a similar general impression: 'horseradish'. My mind had been willing to put up with something ludicrous rather than believe the evidence before my eyes that such a word as 'heresiarch' existed. Moral of all this: Don't use unfamiliar spellings or strange words. People's eyes will refuse to read them.'

And there is one other point we should make about the paragraph:

THE PPARGARAH IS A GAERT ELPMAXE OF WHY PIALN EHSILGNH CNGIAPMAN STSEGGUS ADNIDIOVG BCOLK CLATIPAS. BSUACEE WDROS IN BCOLK CLATIPAS HAVE NO SPAHE, THE REDAER HAS TO RAED EREVY LETTER ILLAUDIVIDNY WCIHH IS MCUH MROE TMIE CNIMUSNOG AND A PALUCITRAR PELBORM FOR ANOYNE WITH DIXELSYA OR SALIMIR RNIDAEG DEITLUCIFFIS!

After all that, you are probably longing for a straightforward, error-free, no-gimmicks sentence. So try this one, quoted in the Guardian city diary this week.

'Further to the announcement on 28 July 2003, Telewest Communications plc ('Telewest') announces that it has reached agreement in principle, subject to certain conditions, on the terms of its financial restructuring ('the restructuring') with the ad hoc committee of its bondholders, WR Huff Asset Management, the Liberty Media Group and IDT corporation pursuant to which the holders of all outstanding notes and debentures issued by Telewest and Telewest Finance (Jersey) Limited would receive in aggregate 98.5% of the issued share capital of the restructured company following the restructuring and the holders of Telewest's existing share capital would receive the remaining 1.5% of the issued share capital.'

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Plain English update 12 September 2003

We are taking part in a government consultation about, confusingly enough, government consultations. The aim is to revise the code of practice for departments running consultations. Among the subjects covered by the code is the need for every consultation to be 'clear, concise and accessible'.

If any readers have any views or experiences of consultations that they would like us to include in our response (particularly in terms of clear and unclear language in consultations), please let us know.

A few months ago we discussed the issue of whether we were giving undue attention to Labour politicians when it came to highlighting baffling speeches. We concluded that it was not an intentional bias, rather that the government of the day would always come under closer scrutiny because their language was more likely to affect people's lives.

This week, courtesy of a transcript in the Times, we bring you an example from the other side of the political divide. Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith appeared on Radio 4's Today to discuss his party's main election strategy. Whatever your political views, we think its safe to say that one of his sentences could certainly have been more concise:

Presenter James Naughtie: 'What's the big idea?'

Mr Duncan Smith: 'I think the key thing that we've been developing for the past two years, which I believe will come to fruition at the conference - and that's the important point - is that we become the antidote to what has become a Government that believes in total politics, control of everything, control of what hospitals and schools do, denying parents and patients any sort of choice, the antidote to that is to break down the role of central government, dramatically reduce it and push it out to those who require to administer our public services and those who require to use our public services.'

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Plain English update 5 September 2003

To follow up our newsletter last week, 'Subject to concluded missives' is a term commonly used when a house in Scotland is provisionally sold. The 'concluded missives' are the formal letters agreeing the sale. Meanwhile, a reader spotted a particularly polite estate agent in Devon who simply used the term 'Spoken For'!

One of the reasons why clear writing is so important is that a reader cannot pick up clues for interpretation from the tone of speech. Melissa Kite of The Times gave a good example this week in her sketch of the Hutton Inquiry about the death of Dr David Kelly. She suggested Lord Hutton had four different versions of 'Yes'.

• 'Yes' means 'Continue please.'
• 'Yurse' suggests 'Hmm, maybe, but you'd better explain that.'
• 'Yuuuuuurs' says 'Hang on one cotton-pickin' minute, surely you don't mean...?'
• 'Yes, well, thank you' means 'Stuff and nonsense, man! Stop wasting my time.'

Many abbreviations and technical phrases serve a useful purpose, accurately describing a particular process. The Guardian's business diary reported on such a process this week. It involved a variation on a standard management buyout, where senior staff get funding to buy their company. (This is an alternative to a buy-in, where people from outside buy the company.)

In this particular case, a combination of senior staff and outsiders had bought the company together, a situation described as 'buy-in management buyout'. All fine so far. The only problem was the choice of acronym. As a cover note put it:

'Please find attached a press release relating to the bimbo of the Clinovia Group.'

There's another jargon-related survey doing the rounds this week. Of a thousand people questioned:

• two-thirds said they had no idea what computer support staff at their firm were talking about when they had a problem;
• half thought the support staff 'talked another language';
• seventy per cent said it would help if the computer experts used analogies; such as drawing parallels between the workings of a computer and a car; and
• forty per cent believed computer experts didn't realise how confusing their use of jargon was.

The writers of a review of government communications, published this week, appear to have watched too many episodes of 'Yes, Minister':

'We recommend that the Strategic Communications Unit should be renamed the Prime Minister's Communications Support Unit, to avoid confusion with the Strategic Planning and Development Function reporting to the Permanent Secretary, Government Communications...'

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