62 24 040710 final...2 Clarity 62 November 2009Country representatives Slovak Republic Ing. Ján...

ClarityNumber 62 November 2009

Journal of theinternational associationpromoting plain legal language

Guest editor for this issue:Neil James

Editor in chief:Julie Clement

In this issueThe Hon. Nathan Rees, MPOpening address 5

Dr. Robert EaglesonEnsnaring perceptions on communication:Underlying obstacles to lawyers writing plainly 9

Wessel VisserThe credit crisis has its roots in Main Street,not Wall Street 14

William LutzPlain language and financial transparency:What you don’t understand can cost (or make)you money 16

Lynda HarrisMaking the business case for plain English 19

Ernest Gowers (Ann Scott)Plain words 22

Ben PiperRighting the wrongs of rewriting 30

Pam PetersKeynote addressInternational trends in English style and usage 34

Candice BurtLaws set the framework for plain languagein South Africa 41

Angela ColterAssessing the usability of credit card disclosures 46

Caroline LindbergDeveloping plain language multilingualinformation about the law 53

The Hon. Michael Kirby AC CMGClosing addressPlain concord: Clarity’s ten commandments 58

Clarity and general newsHow to join Clarity 15Call for special papers 15Thanks to Richard Woof 18Coming conferences 21Phil Knight retires from Clarity committee 33Member news 65From the President 66Members by country 67

2 Clarity 62 November 2009

Country representatives

Slovak RepublicIng. Ján [email protected]

South AfricaCandice [email protected]

SpainCristina [email protected]

SwedenHelena Englundhelena.englund@

sprakkonsulter.na.se

UKSarah [email protected]

USAProf Joseph [email protected]

ZimbabweWalter [email protected]

Other European countries:Catherine [email protected]

All other countries:Please contact the USArepresentative

Patrons The Rt Hon Sir Christopher Staughton, The Honorable Michael Kirby, andH E Judge Kenneth Keith

Founder John Walton

CommitteePresident: Christopher Balmford ([email protected])Members: Country Representatives plus Simon Adamyk, Mark Adler, Michèle Asprey, Peter Butt,

Sir Edward Caldwell, Richard Castle, Annetta Cheek, Julie Clement, Robert Eagleson,Jenny Gracie, Philip Knight, Robert Lowe, John Pare, Daphne Perry, John Walton,Richard Woof.

ArgentinaMaximiliano Marzettimaximiliano.marzetti@

erasmusmundus-alumni.eu

AustraliaChristopher [email protected]

BangladeshA.K. Mohammad [email protected]

CanadaNicole [email protected]

ChileClaudia Poblete [email protected]

FinlandHeikki [email protected]

GermanySiegfried [email protected]

Hong KongEamonn [email protected]

IndiaDr. K.R. [email protected]

IsraelMyla [email protected]

ItalyChristopher [email protected]

JapanKyal [email protected]

LesothoRetsepile Gladwin [email protected]

MalaysiaJuprin [email protected]

MexicoSalomé Flores Sierra [email protected]

The NetherlandsHélène [email protected]

New ZealandLynda [email protected]

NigeriaDr. Tunde [email protected]

PeruRicardo Leó[email protected]

PhilippinesVictor Eleazar

PortugalSandra Ramalhosa [email protected]

Honor roll of donors to Clarity

Clarity is managed entirely by volunteers and is funded through membership fees and donations.We gratefully acknowledge those financial supporters who have contributed to Clarity’s success:

$2,500+ Plain English Foundation, one anoymous donor

$1,000+ Christopher Balmford, Joseph Kimble, Julie Clement

$500+ None

$100+ None

Clarity 62 November 2009 3

An international associationpromoting plain legal languagewww.clarity-international.netPresidentChristopher [email protected]

Clarity … the journalPublished in May and November

Editor in chiefJulie ClementPO Box 13038Lansing, Michigan 48901Fax: 1 517 334 [email protected]

Advertising ratesFull page: £150Smaller area: pro rataMinimum charge: £20Contact Joe Kimble, [email protected]

Copyright policyAuthors retain copyright in their articles.Anyone wanting to reproduce an article inwhole or in part should first obtain theauthor’s permission and should acknowledgeClarity as the source.

SubmissionsWe encourage you to submit articles to beconsidered for publication in Clarity. Sendsubmissions directly to editor in chief JulieClement. Please limit submissions to approxi-mately 1,500 or 3,000 words.

This issue

Raising the standard

Dr Neil JamesExecutive Director, Plain English FoundationCo-convenor, PLAIN 2009

This issue of Clarity takes “Raising the Stan-dard” as its theme. This was the title of theseventh biennial conference of the Plain Lan-guage Association InterNational (PLAIN)held in Sydney, Australia in October 2009.

PLAIN 2009 sought to raise the standard inthree ways:

• showing industry professionals how toimprove their communications

• helping plain language practitioners tostrengthen their own practice

• exploring options for plain language toevolve as a profession.

The 80 speakers at the conference came from13 countries and presented 45 sessions to anaudience of over 300. With such riches to drawfrom, representing the event in a single issueof Clarity was always going to be a challenge.

We started with the keynote speeches andplenaries. PLAIN 2009 had the ideal openingaddress from New South Wales PremierNathan Rees, who promptly announced amajor plain English initiative in Australia’slargest state. Emeritus Professor Pam Peterskept up the standard with an excellent key-note on the prospects for more consistentstandards in international style. And wecould have asked for no better finish thanMichael Kirby’s dinner address, whichshowed that a High Court judge can turnplain language into fine oratory.

The plenaries highlighted two of the hottesttopics of the year: the global financial crisisand the push for plain language laws. Thearticles from PLAIN President Bill Lutz andthe Netherlands’ Wessel Visser discuss howpoor language contributed to the global fi-nancial crisis. To these we’ve added AngelaColter’s case study on the usability of creditcard disclosure documents, which fed intothe new credit laws Congress passed in 2009.


Plain language laws were also the subject ofthe second plenary, which represented acountry that already has them (South Africa)a country poised to get a new Federal law(the United States) and a country just settingout on that journey (New Zealand). In thisissue, Candice Burt shares the South Africanexperience and the pitfalls other countriesmight watch for.

To maximise relevance for Clarity members,the next papers we selected were also stronglyrelated to the law. So we have Dr RobertEagleson’s industry seminar exploring whylawyers write the way they do. Ben Piper’sworkshop looks at the dangers of plain lan-guage in legal drafting. Caroline Lindberg’sshowcase outlines a model plain languageproject for developing multilingual informa-tion in the law.

But already this was too much material fora regular Clarity issue, and we hadn’t evenrepresented the panels or conversations. For-tunately, Clarity was amenable to a longerissue (albeit late) and the Plain English Foun-dation was able to cover the cost.

So we added Lynda Harris’s speech on mak-ing a business case for plain language. Giventhat Lynda runs one of the most successfulplain language enterprises in the world—Write Limited, the home of theWriteMark—we could hardly do better thana piece from her on the topic.

Then I couldn’t resist the temptation of anoriginal, unpublished piece from one of myintellectual heroes. This emerged from one ofthe ‘in-conversation’ interviews with andabout major figures in our field—such as BillLutz, Martin Cutts, Cheryl Stephens, RobertEagleson, Ginny Redish and Peter Butt.

In one of these sessions, Ann Scott spokeabout the biography she has just published ofher grandfather Sir Ernest Gowers, whose1948 book Plain Words arguably did as muchas anything else last century to populariseour work. When Ann suggested there was anunpublished Gowers speech on the topic of“plain words”, the opportunity was too goodto pass up. It is as relevant today as it wasnearly 60 years ago when he delivered it toEnglish teachers of the London CountyCouncil.

Yet Gowers’ speech also highlights how farwe have come in 60 years. Plain language nolonger focuses solely on word choice and syn-tax as it did in his day. It involves design andlayout, topics also represented at the confer-ence. It involves new assessment tools such asTexamen, SEPADO and the Dialect InterfaceSurvey (DIS). And it is forging ahead throughthe work of the International Plain LanguageWorking Group that is drafting an OptionsPaper on six issues that are vital for the de-velopment of our profession:

• a standard definition

• an international standard

• the institutional structure

• certification and training

• the research base

• advocacy.

The group presented a preliminary report atPLAIN 2009, and its paper should be pub-lished in full in a future issue of Clarity. In themeantime, there is plenty to enjoy in this is-sue to help you raise your own standard.

© Neil James, [email protected]

Dr Neil James is theExecutive Director ofthe Plain EnglishFoundation inAustralia, whichcombines plain Englishtraining, editing andauditing with acampaign for moreethical public language.Neil has published threebooks and over 60articles and essays on language and literature. His latestbook Writing at Work (Allen and Unwin, 2007) is apractical book on the use of plain language and rhetoricin the professions. Neil is currently chair of theInternational Plain Language Working Group and wasco-convenor with Dr Peta Spear of the PLAIN 2009conference.

Further papers, video and photos of PLAIN 2009 areavailable at http://www.plainenglishfoundation.com/tabid/3276/default.aspx.


The Hon. Nathan Rees, MPPremier of New South Wales, 2008–2009

The Premier gave this address at the openingsession of the seventh biennial conference of thePlain Language Association InterNational(PLAIN) in Sydney, Australia on 16 October2009.

Let me begin with a plain statement in plainEnglish:

Thank you for inviting me to yourconference.

Or to put it another way:

It is appropriate at the outset to recordsignificant levels of interpersonal gratitudeand relevant appreciation indicators inrespect of the invitation to be present at yourconference in order to facilitate a meaningfulvalues-driven contribution to theproceedings.

Well, I exaggerate, but not a lot. And it maybe significant that when that sentence wastyped into a computer, the computer didn’tquestion it with a wavy green line. Standardsare certainly on the slide when computers letus down.

So it’s good to be among the champions anddefenders of good, plain English, and to wel-come, especially, those of you who have comefrom overseas.

Raising the standard of government

Your conference theme is “Raising the Stan-dard”. And by raising the standard of Englishexpression we are doing more than makinggovernment documents easier to read. We areraising the standard of government.

Because clear English makes for clear think-ing. And clear thinking makes for betterdecision-making, with all the benefits thatcome with it:

• improved delivery of services

• cost-savings

• a healthier, more responsible democracy.

Here in New South Wales, with the supportof the Plain English Foundation, we’ve seensome excellent progress in a number of agen-cies.

In Treasury, as I’m advised, the drafting timefor documents has been reduced by halfthrough adopting plain English principles. AtSydney Water, the time spent by managementediting documents has been cut by 40 percent. At the Audit Office of New South Wales,client satisfaction is up to around 92 per cent.

All positive signs.

But despite the excellent work of the Founda-tion, the battle is far from won. Or as somemight say:

Optimum levels of output in facilitatingstrategic plain English objectives have notbeen identified consistently in all sectors.

It’s not just governments and the bureau-cracy that have developed a culture of usinglanguage to create ambiguity to distract, oreven to hide, the true intent or meaning. DonWatson, one of the great warriors in the causeof plain English, has pointed out that the dis-ease has infected academia and the professions,not to mention the language of corporatemanagement. A culture that can turn peopleinto “human resources” is a dangerous one.In Watson’s words, and I quote from his bookDeath Sentence: The Decay of Public Language:

There have been signs of decay in thelanguage of politics and academia for years,but the direst symptoms are in business. Andthe curse has spread through the pursuit ofbusiness models in places that were neverbusinesses.

Universities that once valued and defendedculture have swallowed the creed whole.Libraries, galleries and museums, banks andwelfare agencies now parrot it. The publicsector spouts it as loudly as the private does.They speak of focusing on the delivery ofoutputs and matching decisions to strategicinitiatives … In an education curriculum orthe mission statements of an internationalfast food chain you will hear the samephrases.1

That’s vintage Watson.

Opening address


And among Australian writers, he’s beenjoined by Clive James—another great fighterfor good English. Both are the beneficiaries ofan English literary tradition in which themodels of plain English prose in the 20th cen-tury were the writings of Bertrand Russell,George Orwell, J.B. Priestley, and the histo-rian Paul Johnson.

Paul Johnson’s advice to writers, written 25years ago, has lost none of its force today. Hewrote:

Beware of what I call bow-bow words. Theseare words which in effect say “keep off” tointruders, and are used by bureaucrats,politicians, educationalists, economists andother groups in real or supposed authority.

And Johnson listed some examples: program-ming, cost-effective, counter-productive,pluralist, optimum, utilize, ongoing, orienta-tion, parameters, structured, unilateral,growth-point, potential, significant (meaningbig), environment, dialogue. There are a greatmany others.

But it’s not enough to avoid bureaucratic jar-gon. Plain English, if it is to serve the objectiveswe seek for it, must also be good English. Andclarity of expression isn’t just a matter of sim-plifying the vocabulary. Or of resorting to akind of facile colloquialism that may, in fact,be no clearer than the original.

Nor is it matter of brevity alone. If it were,Twitterers and Facebook users would be writ-ing exemplary government submissions.

The story is told—and doubtless it’s been toldin many versions—of how Winston Churchillasked an official at the Admiralty to summ-arise on a single sheet of paper the conditionof the British Navy. “Impossible,” said theAdmiralty man. “Really,” said Churchill, “Icould do it with just one word. It’s ‘good’ orit’s ‘bad’. Anything beyond that is a lot ofuseless detail.”

The importance of grammar

Well, Churchill was always one for hyper-bole. But he was also a master of the language.He understood that the best plain English re-quires a thorough grounding in basic literacy.And that must start in our schools. It muststart with the teaching of grammar. I don’tmean that plain English requires a strict ob-servance of every grammatical rule, a pointClive James has argued.

James, of course, is a stickler for good gram-mar, and has written widely in praise of it.But in his latest collection of essays he makesthe point that grammar isn’t everything. Hetells us in The Revolt of the Pendulum:

Bad writing often doesn’t need bad grammarto make it awful. It can be awful even whilekeeping all the formal rules. A perfectly badsentence, indeed, can be an intricate miracleof ostensibly correct construction.2

What is required is a good working knowl-edge of grammar and a respect for thedisciplines that good grammar instills:economy of language, precision, consistency,a logical structure. Let me quote an exampleof an English sentence from a recent NewSouth Wales Government document:

Development that is to be demolished asexempt development under the Code must bedevelopment that can be constructed orinstalled as exempt development.

It reads like a brain teaser. And if you parseand analyse that sentence in the old-fash-ioned way, it boils down to something likethis:

You can only demolish something that youwould have been allowed to build in the firstplace.

From which it follows that you cannot demol-ish anything that you would not have beenallowed to build. That’s confusing enough forme. Imagine how I’d feel if I was actuallywanting to understand what I could orcouldn’t demolish! No wonder grammarcomes in handy.

Here in New South Wales, our schools arenow giving a higher priority to grammar. TheNSW English Syllabus developed by the Boardof Studies explicitly requires the teaching ofgrammar in a practical and engaging way. Textsare used as the basis of grammar lessons andstudents apply the grammar they have learnedto their own writing.

And the good news is that these methods areworking. I’m proud to say that our state hasthe best literacy and numeracy rates in Aus-tralia—with 94–97 per cent of childrenreaching nationwide literacy and numeracybenchmarks.

And I apologise for using that word bench-marks. Don Watson and Paul Johnson wouldalmost certainly not approve of it.


But it’s not only students who need help withgrammar. Many teachers need help as well.So the Department of Education and Trainingis planning a training program for teachers toimprove their knowledge of grammar and helpthem teach it more effectively.

Plain English in public language

All this will lay a solid foundation for the de-velopment of plain English skills in public life.I am advised that the Plain English Founda-tion has already trained more than 4,500New South Wales public servants in improv-ing their writing skills.

Clear communication builds trust and confi-dence. As a government, we can never be trulyaccountable to the public unless we commu-nicate in ways that people can readilyunderstand or respond to.

In particular, people who speak English as asecond language may well have trouble un-derstanding government information andaccessing services. I am advised by the Com-munity Relations Commission that around7.3 per cent of the New South Wales popula-tion acknowledge that they speak English“not well, or not at all”. So it’s essential thatpublic documents are written in good, plainEnglish.

Even the general public—people with normallanguage skills—can have difficulty withtechnical language and jargon. According toa 2006 survey, Adult Literacy and Life Skills,around 46 per cent of New South Walespeople have trouble locating and using infor-mation in everyday documents such as jobapplication forms, payroll forms, transporttimetables, maps, tables and charts.

In New South Wales, our agencies are workinghard to improve the information they provideto the public. Especially those agencies, likeState Emergency Services, where clear Englishmay literally save lives.

We have a long way to go. The roots of theproblem are deep and complex. But as DonWatson has reminded us, the English languagehas always been strong enough to survive as-saults on its integrity.

His latest book, Bendable Learnings, is an attackon the language of modern corporate man-agement3. But he also takes a sideswipe atpoliticians. I quote him in one of his pessimis-tic moods:

Can anyone imagine a premier sometime inthe future speaking to us in a spontaneousand amusing way? One might as wellimagine a government department that isn’tvalues-driven, a bank that isn’t customer-focused, schools that teach rather thandeliver learnings and outcomes.

Don, I don’t take it personally. After all, Ispent some years studying English literature.And I lead a government that takes these is-sues seriously.

Plain English in New South Wales

Let me mention a few other initiatives myGovernment will be adopting shortly.

I’ll be issuing a memorandum to the entireNSW public sector stressing the importanceof plain English—particularly in publicationsand documents intended for public use.

I want that memorandum to set the tone andestablish the benchmarks for agencies in pro-moting the use of plain English.

I want plain English to become an essentialpart of how the public sector does business.

I want to see training in plain English steppedup across the public sector over the next twoyears.

And with this in mind, I intend to establish,beginning in 2010, a special category in thePremier’s Public Sector Awards for the bestuse of plain English in our public sector agen-cies.

But we must also ensure that the higheststandards of plain English are achievedthroughout the entire public sector. We needrigorous tests for readability applied to allGovernment documents for public consump-tion.

I will therefore be directing the Departmentof Premier and Cabinet to arrange for randomchecks by focus groups of selected documentsfrom every public sector agency. The focusgroups will assess the documents for read-ability, clarity, and ease of comprehension. Itwill be a plain English audit of the entire gov-ernment sector.

And agencies that don’t meet the high stan-dards I require will be targeted for remedialtraining.

I am grateful for the support of the Plain En-glish Foundation and Dr Neil James in this


important cause, and I look forward to yourcontinuing support as we tackle the problemwith fresh determination.

So ladies and gentlemen, I leave you with thisthought.

Future parameters for key human resourceslanguage management indicators arepredicated on a high expectation of values-driven optimisation.

In other words: I remain confident.

And I wish you success in your importantmission.

© Nathan Rees, [email protected]

The Hon. Nathan Rees, MPholds the electorate ofToongabie in the New SouthWales Parliament. Afterleaving school, he worked as ahorticultural apprentice andgreenkeeper before completingan honours degree in Englishliterature at the University ofSydney. He then worked as aunion representative beforebecoming an advisor to severalministers in the state Labor government. In 2007, he waselected to the Legislative Assembly and became Ministerfor Emergency Services and Water Utilities. When thePremier Morris Iemma resigned in 2008, Rees waselected unanimously as the 41st Premier of New SouthWales. In early December 2009, after months ofleadership speculation, Rees lost a spill motion in theLabor caucus and resigned as Premier after 15 months inthe job. It is not yet known what will become of the plainEnglish initiatives that he announced at PLAIN 2009.

Endnotes

1 Don Watson, Death Sentence: The Decay of PublicLanguage. Sydney, Knopf, 2003.

2 Clive James, The Revolt of the Pendulum. Essays2005–2008. London, Picador, 2009.

3 Don Watson, Bendable Learnings. The Wisdom ofModern Management. Sydney, Knopf, 2009.


Dr Robert Eagleson

Down the centuries, lawyers have regularlybeen the butt of criticism and cruel jokes be-cause of the convoluted way they write. Fromcertain perspectives these unfavourablejudgements are appropriate and fair; yet, inover 30 years experience working closely withlawyers, I have come across none who delib-erately produce obscure, cumbersomedocuments. They intend to be lucid and, likewriters in many other professions, believetheir documents are clear when they releasethem.

Moreover, lawyers are not born speaking le-galese: it is not natural to them. They beginpractising it only as they take up legal studiesand proceed in their profession. Along the way,they also absorb perceptions and conventionsabout communication that turn them asidefrom plain writing.

These perceptions lie beneath the surface ofour consciousness, and it is only as we haveinsights on their existence and their impacton documents that lawyers can be released toproduce highly comprehensible and efficientdocuments that will earn them the apprecia-tion of the community.

This paper looks at five of these perceptions.

Perception 1: The paramountcy of precision

It is incontestable that accuracy of content isvital in any legal document. But in preparingtheir documents, lawyers often give the im-pression of a single-minded commitment toprecision. Other considerations—and especiallyease of comprehension for the audience—donot seem to come into play.

The experience of writing at university andlaw school contributes to the development ofthis restrictive outlook. Students prepare pa-pers for readers (their professors) who can betaken to know more about the topic than they

do. As a result, there is not the same pressureto explain explicitly the connection betweenitems of information or to help readers un-derstand the flow of the arguments. Instead,the main thrust is to impress the professorwith the students’ knowledge of the law. Theemphasis is on providing correct and ampleinformation.

These experiences get transposed into prac-tice in the legal office. As soon as they includeall the correct and necessary information in adocument, many lawyers see the writing taskas finished. It does not seem to concern themthat the material is not tightly organised, orthat they have assumed knowledge that theirclients would not have. The difficulties thatinexpert readers could have with their docu-ments seem outside their ken simply becausetheir previous major writing experiences havenot called upon them to give attention to thesematters.

Unfortunately, comments of practitioners oflegal writing in highly respected positionshave encouraged this unbalanced emphasison precision. Sir John Rowlatt, a former FirstParliamentary Counsel in Great Britain, ob-served:

The intelligibility of a bill is in inverseproportion to its chance of being right.2

How we can tell if the contents of a bill arecorrect the more unintelligible the bill be-comes is something of a mystery, but we canrecognise how Rowlatt’s forceful pronounce-ment promotes undue, if not exclusive,concern with precision.

Incongruously, Sir Ernest Gowers, of TheComplete Plain Words fame, expressed similarthoughts:

being unambiguous … is by no means thesame as being readily intelligible; on thecontrary the nearer you get to the one, thefurther you are likely to get from the other.3

Ensnaring perceptions on communication:Underlying obstacles to lawyers writing plainly1


During the 1970s, legislative drafters in Aus-tralia seized on these words to justify theirown excruciatingly entangled compositionswhen the drafting of legislation came underrenewed attack from the plain languagemovement.

The notion that there is an inherent antago-nism between precision and intelligibility orclarity, that where one is achieved the othermust suffer, is palpably false and contrary tothe true purpose of language—which is to in-form, to edify, to illumine. We write so thatanother will understand us, and not be left ina fog. If we cannot express our ideas clearly,then we have to question how sure and clear-cut is our understanding of them.

Examples abound to demonstrate that thereis no real opposition between accuracy andclarity, and that the attainment of compre-hensibility does not jeopardise precision. Toselect a straightforward illustration, The Acci-dent Compensation Act 1985 (Victoria)followed the then normal practice in legisla-tion of this type by first establishing the legaland administrative frameworks by which thelegislation was to be conducted before settingout the substantive matters of the legislation:

The Accident Compensation Act 1985

Part 1 Preliminary

Part 2 Accident Compensation Commission

Part 3 Accident Compensation Tribunal

Part 4 Types of compensation

This arrangement is puzzling and frustratingto members of the public, ignoring their ex-pectations and order of priorities. Their majorinterest lies in what forms of compensationare available to them—the details of how thescheme is administered is of little immediateconcern. In short, the Act should have begunwith the contents of Part 4, and this is now theapproach to this type of legislation in Austra-lia. Importantly, the change in organisationhas no impact on the precision of the mate-rial but greatly increases its accessibility forgeneral readers.

The same may be said for new ways oforganising letters of advice, court rulings,and contracts, and for different choices ofgrammatical structure. The actual details ofthe content and its exactitude are left un-touched. Only the comprehensibility of thedocuments is improved.

Perception 2: Inseparability of related de-tails

The second ensnaring perception intertwinessomewhat with the first one. A lot of draftinghas been influenced by the belief that everyqualification and exception relating to aproposition must be held together in the onesentence. This leads to the production ofoverlong, convoluted sentences—often of 200,500 or even 800 words in length. The worst Ihave seen is a sentence with over 1200 wordsin a residential mortgage!

A shorter example comes from a superannua-tion policy for the staff of a major Australianbank:

The total number of shares issued inconsequence of acceptance of the share offersmade on a particular occasion shall notexceed the number which is equal to 0.5% ofthe aggregate number of shares that were onissue on the first day of the year in whichthat occasion occurs, and if the number of theshares the subject of all such acceptancesexceeds that limit every such acceptance andthe contract constituted by it shall be deemedto relate to that number of shares (being awhole multiple of 10 shares) which is thegreatest that can be accommodated withinthat limit having regard to the number ofacceptances.

As the staff was having so much difficulty inunderstanding the clause, the editor of thestaff magazine decided to run an article on itin the hope of throwing some light on itsmeaning.4 During an interview for the article,the Chief Legal Counsel acknowledged thetrouble the clause was giving staff and that itwas “a good example of legalese”. The jour-nalist queried:

“Couldn’t this clause be at least divided intotwo sentences? That would make it at least alittle easier to read.”

The lawyer responded firmly:

“No. You can’t afford to separate the twoideas in that paragraph with a full stop. Itwould be encouraging people to ignore thesecond clause, which tends to qualify thefirst. It might just possibly lead tomisunderstanding”

He preferred to concentrate on a risk thatwas minute—“just possibly” are his words—and to ignore the massive likelihood, and in


the bank’s case the reality, that by not divid-ing the sentence many would be bamboozledand never arrive at the meaning. Worse still,this approach ignores the natural readingprocesses of people who, when faced withcontorted language, will stop reading alto-gether or, in despair of unravelling themessage, will guess at it.

Some studies have shown that the limit offrustration for most readers is 80–90 seconds.If they cannot decipher the meaning of a sen-tence in this period, they will guess at ameaning and pass onto the next sentence.They can hardly be blamed for this action.While readers have a responsibility to approacha document with interest and commitment,writers have an equal responsibility to shapetheir message in a way that is congenial forreaders.

This type of frustration is not limited to non-experts, but professionals also yield to it. Whenasked what he thought of the plain EnglishNRMA car insurance policy when it first ap-peared in 1976 (a first for Australia), and inparticular whether he thought it was betterthan the old one, the then Chief Justice of NewSouth Wales responded that “he could neverbring himself to read the old policy: he justtrusted that the NRMA was an honourablecompany”!

Perception 3: The pre-eminence of custom

We can all be bedevilled in various ways byan unthinking, blind acceptance of what hasbeen, investing it with an unchallengeable su-periority, and persisting with using it.

The action of over 400 scientists in Great Brit-ain is instructive.5 When asked to assess twoversions of a technical article—one whichhad been prepared in the traditional style forscience and a second version rewritten accord-ing to the principles of plain language—thescientists favoured the rewritten version over-whelmingly in answer to these questions:

Which style is more precise?

Which writer gives the impression of being amore competent scientist?

Which writer inspires confidence?

Which passage shows a more organised mind?

The scientists nominated the original versionwhen the question became:

Which passage is more difficult to read?

Yet many felt constrained by convention tofollow this more difficult style in their ownwriting. Their behaviour is irrational, but itshows the force of custom. Writers need to begiven confidence to adopt what their judge-ments tell them is clearer and more effective.

The conventionally held view that writing isa more elevated form of speech largely liesbehind the bloated, obscure form of adviceoffered by the Heart Foundation:

Severe dietary restriction is usuallyunnecessary.

The recommendation started out in the moredirect form of:

You usually don’t have to diet strictly.

Mixed in here too is the notion that utterancesof an organisation with the important statusof the Heart Foundation call for inflated lan-guage.

Similarly, at the end of a workshop a seniorjudge in the Court of Appeal complimentedme on the instruction I had given to the juniorjudges and registrars on how rulings shouldbe expressed and on how to write plainly, butwent to add, “But I can’t write like that. I mustappear erudite.”

And so our perception of our supposed statusin the community and what it requires of uscomes to overrule other considerations, andin particular that language was given to us sothat we could help others to understand andacquire knowledge. We may not change themessage, but it becomes harder for others toperceive it. There is also the danger that oth-ers may not value our efforts as erudite!

Perception 4: The permanence of language

Many have also come to hold that the lexicaland grammatical structures established inpast documents are fixed and permanent,and essential to preserve the intended preci-sion. Change is seen as decadent. As a result,we can still find clauses holding onto wordsin senses they no longer carry, such as sever-ally:

The defendants are jointly and severally liableunder the Home Loan.

This practice ignores the fact that whenElizabethan lawyers framed the clause theydid not hesitate to use current words in the


current senses of their times. They believedthat the language of their day could cope. Toprevent a gulf developing between the usageof law and the usage of the general commu-nity, we too should turn to the words of ourday to help us. We can safely do so, as theuse of individually demonstrates:

The defendants are jointly and individuallyliable under the Home Loan.

Change, when it is rigorously selected, is pos-sible without destroying meaning.

This fourth perception encourages slavishsubservience to grammatical conventions thathave become outmoded, and so leads tograceless and unnatural writing. The singularuse of they is a good case in point. The Aus-tralian project to rewrite the CorporationsLaw in plain language exploited its conve-nience and familiarity:

A person is entitled to have an alternativeaddress included in notices if their name, butnot their residential address, is on an electoralroll …6

This practice avoids the cumbersome repeti-tion of the noun (the person’s name, theperson’s residential address) or the equallyawkward his or her.

During the testing sessions held on the newversion of the law in all states in Australia,most participants—including the legal andother professionals taking part—welcomedthis development. The small number whoobjected on the grounds that it was “un-grammatical” were unaware that the practicehad begun in the Middle Ages and that bythe twentieth century had become dominant.Nor did they seem to realise that the Englishlanguage had experienced a similar changein the sixteenth and seventeenth centurieswhen thou virtually disappeared from thelanguage and you came to serve in both sin-gular and plural contexts.

A major legal firm has adopted the same con-temporary approach in its style book:

When a partner signs their own name

Perception 5: The narrowness of plain lan-guage

There is a misconception that plain Englishis a basic form of the language, one that is se-

verely reduced and truncated. As well, it iswrongly imagined that it has only one form,without variation and variability. Instead it isa full version of the language, calling on allthe patterns of normal, adult English. It em-braces in its scope:

The three terminal gills of zygopterous larvaeare borne by the epiproct and the paraprocts.Usually they have the form of elongate plates,but in certain species they are vesicular.

This is an instance of plain (scientific) writing,but it is plain only for its particular, intendedaudience: advanced students of entomology.Despite the inclusion of several less familiarwords, it is easy to recognise the direction ofthe sentences and any of us could answer aquestion like What is the function of the paraprocts?

Plain language does not ban or exclude tech-nical terms, or any other of the varied structuresin the language. Lawyers, for example, arefree to use terms of art when writing to col-leagues because they are efficient andeffective in these contexts. Shakespeare dem-onstrated this flexibility and freedom when inMacbeth he first penned:

The multitudinous seas incarnadine

This line no doubt would have appealed im-mensely to those in the audience who had aneducation in the classics and who were awareof the tremendous number of borrowings fromthe classical languages that was occurring inEnglish at the time. But Shakespeare realisedthat the line would have been meaningless toanother important segment of the audience,and so he added:

Making the green one red

We all need a similar facility and fluency inlanguage. To write plainly does not call on usto abandon any portion of our language orrestrict our linguistic repertoire, but rather toenlarge and enrich it so that we can encom-pass the demands of our diverse audiencesdynamically and incisively. What shapes ourrepertoire, what determines our choice in anygiven document, is the needs and capacity ofour audience. Only as we achieve clarity ofexpression and ease of comprehension canwe genuinely serve the members of our com-munity.

© Dr Robert Eagleson, [email protected]


Robert Eagleson hasbeen involved in ground-breaking plain Englishwork in Australia. Hecontributed extensively tothe first plain Englishlegal document (a carinsurance policy) in1976. As commissioner incharge of the plainEnglish reference to the Victorian Law ReformCommission, he demonstrated that even complexlegislation could be written in plain language. From1993–97 he was a member of the taskforce directing therewriting of the Australian Corporations Law in plainEnglish. From 1983–87 Robert was Special Adviser onplain language to the Australian Government. He actedas consultant in plain legal language to MallesonsStephen Jacques from 1987–2000. He was appointedFounding Co-Director of the Law Foundation Centre forPlain Legal Language.

Robert has also been a consultant to Law ReformCommissions in Canada and New Zealand and hasconducted workshops in Canada, France, Hong Kong,Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, Sweden, Thailand,the UK and the USA. He has received a number of awardsfrom the Australian Government and national andinternational professional associations for hiscontributions to plain writing and literacy.

His publications include Writing in Plain English andover 60 monographs and articles on plain English, aswell as some 50 books and articles on English language,including a dictionary of Shakespeare’s language forOxford University Press.

At the PLAIN 2009 conference in Sydney, Robert waspresented with the Plain Language AssociationInterNational Award for an outstanding contribution toplain language internationally.

Endnotes1 This paper was originally delivered at the seventh

biennial conference of Plain LanguageAssociation InterNational, Sydney, 15-17 October2009. It is also being published in the MichiganBar Journal, and is reproduced here with manythanks to Joseph Kimble.

2 Cited in H. Kent, In on the Act, London, Macmillan,1979, p. 79.

3 Ernest Gowers, The Complete Plain Words, London,Pelican, 1962, p. 18-19. A careful reading ofGowers shows that he was not talking aboutintelligibility at all but rather grace or elegance ofstyle.

4 Changes, Sydney, Westpac, May 1987, p. 5.5 C. Turk, “Do you write impressively?” in Bulletin

of the British Ecological Society 9, 1978, pp. 5-10.6 Commonwealth of Australia, First Corporate Law

Simplification Act 1994 section 242 (5).

From the editor

Clarity 62 has been an adventure. Lastsummer, we hoped to publish our Novem-ber 2009 issue a few months early. Wewanted to encourage you to read moreand think more about plain-languagestandards, to prepare for the 2009 PLAINconference in Sydney. For a variety ofgood reasons, this plan—“plan A”—wasabandoned . . . along with plans B and C.Through it all, our guest editor, NeilJames, has been a rock. If you attendedPLAIN’s 2009 conference, you know thatNeil does nothing halfway. This issue isno different. Neil has pulled together anincredible collection of articles, most ofwhich are from the Sydney conference.And while I must apologize for the delayin publishing Clarity 62, I believe this is-sue is worth the wait. Thank you, Neil.

As you read this, we’re finishing Clarity63, and we’ve begun Clarity 64. AndClarity 65 will highlight our 2010 confer-ence.

These are important times for plain lan-guage. On April 29, the Center for PlainLanguage will give ClearMark awards tothe best examples of plain language inseveral categories and WonderMarkawards to the worst examples. Emcee forthis important Washington D.C. eventwill be our own president, ChristopherBalmford. In Portugal, Sandra Martins isplanning Clarity’s October 2010 confer-ence. And in Sweden, Helena Englund isplanning PLAIN’s 2011 conference.

I hope you enjoy Clarity 62 as much asI’ve enjoyed reading these articles as Neilhas sent them. And I hope to see yousoon—in Washington D.C., in Lisbon,and in Stockholm.


Wessel VisserDirector, BureauTaal Plain Language

Incomprehensible mortgage offers and finan-cial products were the cause of the currentcredit crisis. To prevent another crisis fromoccurring, we desperately need plain languagein the financial markets.

To understand the link between plain languageand the credit crisis, we have to go back to thevery beginning. Our story begins with a mort-gage agent, Brad Kent, asking Joe Simpson, alocal supermarket manager in Florida:

“Why don’t you buy that house?” Brad waspointing to a spacious new home down MainStreet.

“No,” Joe said, “I cannot afford it.

“Yes, you can,” Brad replied, “the house onlycosts $600,000.”

“That’s what I mean,” Joe said, “that’s far tooexpensive for me.”

“Well, Brad replied, “can you afford $500 amonth?”

“Of course‚” Joe said, “I earn $4000 a month.”

“Listen,” Brad replied, “I can offer you amortgage that will let you buy that for only$500 a month.”

Obviously, Joe had to discuss the option withhis wife Cynthia, a hairstylist. They signedthe mortgage. Part of the offer was a provi-sion that the interest rate would rise from oneper cent to eight per cent after two years. Butthis provision was incomprehensible to Joe,just as the language of loan offers is incom-prehensible to many Americans.

Not long after closing the deal, mortgageagent Brad contacted a bank. He offered thema complex financial product with a six percent annual return for the next 30 years. Theprospectus defined the product to be basedon high-quality real estate in sun-state

Florida. The prospectus contained an overkill ofabstract and ambiguous language about thenature of the investment.

But one thing in the prospectus was specificand unambiguous: the expected return is sixper cent annually for 30 years. That wouldflow from the eight per cent mortgage pay-ments that Joe and Cynthia were facing fromyear three. No matter that Joe and Cynthiahad no hope of paying. All the prospectusneeded was the following mandatory phrase:“past results don’t guarantee future gains”.

The rest of the story is well known. The fi-nancial product was traded on internationalfinancial markets. It ended up in the portfo-lios of Swiss UBS, Dutch Fortis or LehmanBrothers.

Meanwhile, Joe Simpson’s monthly mortgagepayment leapt to $4000 a month. Which hecould not afford. He defaulted. And with toomany like him in the area, the value of thehouse plummeted to the point where itwasn’t saleable. So UBS or Fortis or LehmanBrothers suddenly owned a worthless finan-cial product. This was the essence of thecredit crisis.

How can we prevent this from happeningagain? Is it feasible to leave governments tomanage the international financial markets?Or—as some European governments put it—to have socialists march into Wall Street?

The solution is simpler. If Joe Simpson hadunderstood that he would be paying one percent interest for no longer than two yearsand eight per cent for the next 28 years, thenhe would never have bought the oversizedhome he couldn’t afford. And if the bank hadunderstood that the complex financial prod-uct was based on eight per cent mortgages onordinary Americans who had bought homesworth ten times their annual income, itwould not have bought that product.

The credit crisis has its roots in Main Street,not Wall Street


Economists know that markets only operatewell if all participants are well informed. The2001 Nobel Prize winner George Akerlof iden-tified the severe problems that afflict marketscharacterized by asymmetrical information.Joe Simpson didn’t understand his mortgageoffer. Many top economists in internationalfinancial institutions didn’t understand thecomplex financial products they bought.

The solution is to communicate financialproducts in plain language. A language thatJoe Simpson understands. A language that allfinancial experts can be held accountable to.We don’t need socialists on Wall Street. Wedon’t need to curtail the freedom of financialmarkets with peculiar rules. But we do needto communicate in plain language.

© Wessel Visser, 2009

Wessel Visser is director of theNetherlands’ first plain lan-guage organisation, BureauTaal,which he established in 2002.BureauTaal works for a range oforganisations, includinggovernment agencies, financialservices companies and healthcare organisations. The companyalso developed Texamen, aninstrument that measures thereadability level of text inDutch and English. They organised and hosted the sixthPlain Language InterNational conference in Amsterdamin 2007. That year, Bureautaal also rewrote the DutchConstitution in plain language, attracting considerablepublic and media interest.

Call for special papers

Join a team to clarify a legal document

Clarity2010 will bring together plain language specialists, information design-ers and legal experts from around the world to exchange experiences and newideas about promoting clear communication in the public and private sectors.

We are looking for law students, information designers and plain languagepractitioners to work in teams and turn complex legal documents into things ofdazzling clarity.

You will get the chance to present your projects during the conference, 12-14October, and get feedback from the world’s top experts. If you’re interested,email us and we’ll put you in touch with potential team members around theglobe.

Deadline: 30 April 2010

Contributing to the journal

Clarity often focuses on a specifictheme (like conferences or drafting orstandards), but we also publish articleson a variety of other plain-languagetopics. Please submit your articles tothe editor in chief for consideration.

Would you like to be a guest editor?Our guest editors gather articles, workwith the authors, make layout deci-sions, and edit and proofread a singleissue. If you would like to guest edit anissue of the Clarity journal, send anemail to the editor in chief.

Finally, if you have ideas about improv-ing the journal, the editor would like tohear from you, as well. Our editor inchief is Professor Julie Clement, withthe Thomas M. Cooley Law School.Email her at [email protected].


William LutzPresidentPlain Language Association InterNational

In October 2000, James Chanos, a hedge fundmanager, started to analyse the financial dis-closure statements of a major and verywell-known American corporation. The docu-ment he used is known as the Form 10-K,which publicly traded corporations must filewith the Securities and Exchange Commis-sion every year. The form must disclose thecomplete financial status of the company, soit is audited and reviewed for accuracy andcompleteness by hordes of accountants andattorneys before it is filed. Analysts, investors,and others use the form to evaluate thesoundness of a company and whether to in-vest in it.

But the more Chanos looked at this 10-K, themore he became convinced that this documentwas less than forthcoming. He was concernedabout the murky language filled with vaguereferences. Then, too, there were the sentencesthat were so convoluted and filled with somuch jargon that they were meaningless. Themore he read the less he knew, and the less heunderstood what the company was doing—and how it was supposedly making money. Sohe decided to invest on the assumption thatthe company had little if any future.

A few months later, a writer at Fortune maga-zine examined the company’s financialstatements and came to a less harsh conclu-sion. She published what has now come to beregarded as a prophetic article. “Is EnronOverpriced?” appeared in the 5 March 2001issue, and prompted a lot of comment.Throughout the article, the reporter askssimple questions that should have been an-swered in the company’s 10-K: how exactlydoes Enron make its money, and just how muchmoney is it really making? These should beeasily answered by reading the company’s10-K, but no one the reporter spoke to could

answer them. “If you figure it out, let meknow,” one analyst said.

The importance of transparency

We all know the ending to this story. Trans-parency in financial disclosure is the foundationof capitalism. That is, everyone involved ininvesting must understand what they are in-vesting in and what the risks are. Indeed,there are thousand of pages of regulationsspecifying the information companies mustdisclose to investors. Unfortunately, there arefew regulations requiring that companies makethat disclosure clear, understandable andtransparent. In the world of financial disclo-sure, it’s reader (and investor) beware. In thisworld, words are your enemy, and you hadbetter be prepared to fight for the informationyou want.

Fortunately, all is not lost. If we have learnedanything these last two years, it’s that trans-parency must be required of those who wouldhave us invest in their ventures. Warren Buffettpointed out that he never invested in the nowinfamous collateralised debt obligations (CDOs)because he simply didn’t understand them.And he doesn’t invest in what he doesn’t un-derstand. Indeed, he wondered how anyonecould claim to understand them, since thedocument explaining a CDO could run from15,000 to 750,000 pages! And he wasn’t ex-aggerating. Even a normal 10-K documentcan easily be 1500 pages long. As Mr. Buffettsaid, given the length and complexity of thesedocuments, “nobody knows what the hellthey’re doing”.

The value of plain language

Using plain language in financial disclosurecan be done and is being done by a numberof companies (by plain language, I includeinformation design and the full range of tech-niques that are now a part of the field). Andit is clear that plain language pays off. Twoprofessors in the College of Business at the

Plain language and financial transparencyWhat you don’t understand can cost (or make) you money


University of Notre Dame recently published astudy of 56,079 10-Ks that were filed between1994 to 2006.1 They reached a number ofconclusions about the value of plain language,including:

• greater participation by small investors incompanies that use plain language

• greater participation by seasoned investorsin companies that use plain language

• higher absolute stock returns after filing a10-K in plain language.

In short, plain language serves the financialinterests of the companies using it as well asinvestors.

Another study, this one by the New York firmSiegel+Gale in January 2009, says it all in thetitle: “Simplicity Survey: A Clarion Call forTransparency.”2 Again, the findings are nosurprise. Two-thirds of the people surveyedbelieve companies deliberately make thingscomplicated to keep people in the dark. Be-cause of this belief, people don’t trust banks,mortgage companies, and Wall Street. In-deed, over 84 per cent said they were morelikely to trust and do business with a com-pany who communicates in clear, jargon freelanguage. And 75 per cent believe complexityhelped cause the financial crisis.

A new approach to transparency

In 2008, I undertook a project at the Securi-ties and Exchange Commission to outline aplan for making financial disclosure not justmore transparent, but more useable. Butwhile examining the mountain of paper thatflows into the SEC each year, we quickly real-ized that even plain language wouldn’t helpinvestors. There’s just too much to read—asWarren Buffett pointed out. It was clear thatin a time when people use the Internet to findthe data they want and assemble it into theinformation they want, a static, paper-basedfinancial disclosure system could not anddoes not serve investors.

Our final report recommended moving frompaper to an electronic-based, interactive dis-closure system where investors can easilyfind the data they want to create the infor-mation they want. And that data would be inplain language.3

There is currently a great effort to bring plainlanguage to the health care system because it

is obvious that clear communication in medi-cal matters can be a matter of life and death.Not understanding (or understanding incor-rectly) what to do can have tragic results. Sotoo with our financial health. As we havelearned, a lack of clear communication led tomany people taking on mortgages they couldnot afford, to people buying stock in compa-nies they didn’t know weren’t financiallysound, and to investment bankers investingin CDOs they did not understand.

Unfortunately, we’re all paying the price forthe lack of transparency. Everyone, that is,except the few who bet against the jargonand complex language. Because he couldn’tunderstand Enron’s financial disclosure,James Chanos shorted the stock and made awindfall for himself and his investors whenthe stock’s price collapsed. But he didn’tmake as much as hedge fund manager JohnPaulson made from opaque CDOs. LikeBuffett, Paulson didn’t understand how allthose mortgage-backed CDOs were worth somuch. So he bet against them, and in one dayhe made $1.25 billion. Yes, billion with a “b”.And in 2007, his fund made $15 billion inprofits from betting against those impossible-to-understand CDOs. His personal take was$4 billion.

Sometimes, for some people, a lack of trans-parency is a good thing—a very goodthing—because what you don’t understandcan cost (or make) you money. Lots of money.

© Bill Lutz, [email protected]

Bill Lutz is Professor Emeritusof English at RutgersUniversity. He holds a Ph.D. inEnglish and a Doctor of Lawdegree. He served as editor ofthe Quarterly Review ofDoublespeak for fourteenyears and is the author orcoauthor of seventeen books,including DoublespeakDefined; The NewDoublespeak: Why No OneKnows What Anyone’s Saying Anymore;Doublespeak: From Revenue Enhancement toTerminal Living; and The Cambridge Thesaurus ofAmerican English.

As an expert on plain language, Bill has worked withover three dozen corporations and government agenciesand has served as an expert witness on language andplain language in legal proceedings. In 1998, he helped


prepare the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’sPlain English Handbook. From 2008-09, he served asDirector of the SEC’s 21st Century Disclosure Initiative.He is also currently the President of the Plain LanguageAssociation InterNational.

Endnotes1 Tim Loughran and Bill McDonald, “Plain

English”, 9 May 2008, available at .

2 Siegel+Gale Simplicity Survey: A Clarion Call forTransparency,

3 You can download a copy of this report at.

Thanks to Richard WoofSubmitted by Nick LearBarcombe, England, December 2009

Richard Woof and I were partners atDebenham and Co. In the early 1980’s wewere both interested in pioneering prop-erty contracts and leases in modernEnglish. Setting out the main information(we called it the “Particulars”) at the be-ginning of a lease seems commonplacenow. Then it was revolutionary and by nomeans met with universal approval amongour peers in the world of commercial prop-erty. Richard set about educating ourclients, who to their credit generally sawthe advantages of clear layout and com-prehensible language. We had little timefor the received wisdom—that arcane lan-guage was right because it had alwaysbeen that way. If our documents were in-capable of being understood by the client,we had failed. Our views were not evenshared by all the firm’s partners. One ofthe younger ones felt she had failed if theclient did understand her draftmanship!

Richard and I both responded enthusiasti-cally to a letter in the Law Society’sGazette in March 1983 seeking interest instarting an organisation to promote plainEnglish in legal documents. Clarity wasborn. Each of us was to take a turn on thecommittee. Richard persevered. His servicethere must be matched by few, the re-doubtable Mark Adler apart.

It was not just use of words. Richard wasalways ready to adopt new technology—mastering early the intricacies of theelectric typewriter, the golf ball typewriter,computers and the internet. He had an eyefor layout and presentation. Long beforeothers appreciated it, he understood thatthe look of a document affects the way itdoes its job. Before the word “user-friendly” came into general use, Richardpreached the value of white space, bulletpoints and the like. In the early days ofcomputers, the rest of us had no ideawhether a certain effect could be achieved.Richard made it his business to know whatthe machines could do—and alwayspressed the operators on to greater things.

Brevity was always a holy grail. I remem-ber once we discussed the origin of thestory of a certain writer who had ended along letter with an apology for its length,explaining that he had not had time towrite a short one. Some said it was MarkTwain. Others favoured GK Chesterton.Richard set about researching the story,worrying away at it for months (it waslong before internet search engines). It wastypical of him to be thorough in everythinghe did. I believe he traced it back to BlaisePascal, 1656. It’s almost disheartening howeasy it is today, using Google, to find a ver-sion attributed to Augustin (354-430 AD)or even Cicero.

How to join Clarity

The easiest way to join Clarity is to visithttp://sites.google.com/site/legalclarity/, complete an application,and submit it with your payment. Youmay use PayPal or a credit card to pay.

Prospective members in Canada, Italy,and the United States may also pay bybank draft. If you do not have internetaccess, you may complete the applica-tion on page 68 and contact yourcountry representative for submissioninstructions. Country reps are listed onpage 2.


Lynda HarrisDirector, Write Limited

Enthusiasm isn’t enough!

You’re an enthusiastic proponent of plainEnglish and its benefits for readers and organ-isations. And you can see that you or yourclient organisation needs it. But how do youeducate and convince those who control thepurse strings?

Whether you’re an employee trying to persuadeothers to adopt plain English, or a profes-sional trying to sell plain English to clients,you need to present a convincing businesscase for change and a clear return on invest-ment. The discipline of writing a business casewill clarify your thinking, get the facts andbenefits down on paper, and greatly increasethe chance that your proposal will be takenseriously.

After years of writing proposals for plain En-glish projects, and helping clients write theirown business cases, we’ve found a formulathat works for us.

Getting your plain English project paid for

Identify your real proposition

It’s all too easy to think that “plain English”is your proposition. It isn’t. Plain English issimply a means to an end. Your real propositionis about creating a great leap forward in yourorganisation’s ability to connect and commu-nicate, and therefore fulfil its business purpose.

Identify the scale of what you are proposing.Are you proposing complete organisationalchange? Or a pilot project with a division orspecialised team?

Find the compelling “why”

No proposal will succeed without a compelling“why”. Think of the “why” as the “problem”,with the benefits of your plan being the solu-tion. Linking your proposal to the

achievement of your organisation’s missionand purpose is critical.

We can borrow a useful analogy from themanufacturing sector. A manufacturing firmsells products and needs a distribution systemto deliver its products to customers. If the de-livery mechanism fails, the company fails.

For most of the organisations we deal with,information is the product and writing is thedelivery mechanism. In this context, a poordocument (failed delivery mechanism) meansthat an organisation fails to connect andcommunicate. Albert Joseph, author of Put itin Writing (1983) says it beautifully:

The only purpose for cultures to createlanguage is to transport ideas. Then it issimple; we cannot afford a transportationsystem that damages its cargo in transit.1

Attaching the “why” to an organisation’sfundamental purpose is vital. But your pro-posal will be even more compelling if youidentify some very specific gains that can bemade by adopting a plain English writingstyle. Several winners in New Zealand’s an-nual WriteMark Plain English Awardsexpressed their “why” this way:

Plain English … motivates clients to approachus and helps us provide a more efficientservice.’New Zealand Trade and Enterprise

Nothing could be more frustrating for peoplewith injuries … than having to wade throughincomprehensible gobbledygook.Accident Compensation Corporation

Team-Up aims to help parents get moreinvolved in their education by providingpractical, easy-to-follow tips in plain English.Ministry of Education

BRANZ was very aware of the need topromote the science behind sustainabilityin an accessible way.Building Research Association of NewZealand

Making the business case for plain English


Overly complicated communication serves onlyto deepen the divide between client andadvisor… it is our job to know thetechnicalities behind our advice. It is equallyimportant to demonstrate the value of it.Communicating clearly is the first and mostvital step.Deloitte2

Show “how”

Be very clear that your proposal isn’t seensimply as “business writing training”. You areproposing a comprehensive project that thatwill require a new way of thinking. Show ex-actly “how” you will solve the problems raisedin your “why” section.

Converting an organisation to a plain Englishwriting style is not for the faint-hearted. Youneed a long-term plan that is sound, achiev-able, and believable.

Our first step is almost always to establish anagreed, documented plain English standardfor the organisation. We then plan a range ofstrategies and activities that will work togetherto publicise and gain enthusiastic compliancewith that standard.

Always include measures to monitor success.These will give confidence to your decision-maker and indicate that you expect ameasurable return on investment.

Most often our proposal will recommendmany tasks that the organisation can do in-ternally—and the proposal will always aimto make our services redundant over time.

Include realistic costs

Decision-makers need to know exactly whata proposal will cost, over what time period.Most critically, they need to be able to see theexpected return on investment.

While some aspects of your plan may be hardto cost, you need to be as specific and realisticas possible. Don’t forget to factor in opportu-nity cost when fee-producing staff membersare taken off the job to participate in projectactivities.

Use existing case studies to help calculate po-tential return on investment—even if youhave to generalise. And remember to includegains in client or employee satisfaction. Thesegains are real and immensely valuable.

Also try to calculate the cost of doing nothing.How much is poor communication hurtingthe organisation? Link your statements backto your “why” section.

Itemise the deliverables and milestones

Your proposal should then set out the specificitems or tasks that will be created, delivered,or achieved—and when.

For example, you might propose that a projectcommittee will be set up by 6 May, a writingstandard agreed by 4 June and a senior man-agement training session held by 18 June, andso on.

Anticipate the risks

No proposal for a significant project is com-plete without a thoughtful assessment of anypotential risks involved. Taking time at thestart to identify what could go wrong, andplanning accordingly, is your best form of riskmanagement.

In all the years that we have been involved inlarge plain English projects, we have neverseen any significant problem caused by a moveto plain English. However, as the project spon-sor and leader, you do face the risk of losingfunding if you cannot demonstrate some earlyand ongoing success.

Obstacles to success can include lack of man-agement support, unanticipated demands onstaff time, insufficient motivation to changeold habits, and continued use of old prece-dent material.

Paint a clear picture of success

Success is not merely about achieving deliver-ables and milestones. Your proposal should setout clear indicators of success that link directlyback to your proposition—your “why” state-ments—and the plans to measure progress inyour “how” section.

Your success indicators will be both tangible(x hours saved by each call centre staff mem-ber amounting to $x saved in wages, x percent increase in response rate to survey) andintangible (fewer queries from clients who re-ceived legal advice, unsolicited positivefeedback about the new application form,higher ratings in annual quality audit).

In our experience, even a little success is agreat motivator—plan for it and it’s morelikely to occur.


Getting serious pays off

So the bottom line is, “get serious”. The no-tion of plain English may be dear to yourheart, but to turn your passion into realityyou need a solid plan and a clear head. Youalso need tenacity and determination. Othershave walked this path before you and havesome stunning success stories to share. Doyour research and learn from others.

Transforming the way an organisation com-municates is not easy. But the value of thepossible benefits far exceeds the cost of theproject. Making that value clear is up to you.

© Lynda Harris, [email protected]

Lynda Harris is founder anddirector of Write Limited, aNew Zealand-based companywidely acknowledged as aleader in plain English businesswriting. Over 20 years, Writehas become well established inthe professional services market.The company has a broad clientbase of public and private sectororganisations.

Lynda also established the WriteMark, New Zealand’sdocument quality mark, and is the founder of NewZealand’s annual plain English awards. She isNew Zealand’s representative for Clarity and is amember of the International Plain Language WorkingGroup.

Endnotes1 A Joseph, Put it in Writing. Cleveland,

International Writing Institute Incorporated, 1983.2 WriteMark New Zealand Plain English Awards

2009. Viewed at on 13January 2010.

Coming Conferences

June 2010, University of Naples 2

Faculty of Law of the Seconda Università degli Studi di Napoli (University of Naples 2),The Language of Law–pulling together different strands and disciplines

email [email protected]

1-3 July 2010, Poznan, Poland

The Institute of Linguistics at Adam Mickiewicz University, 5th Conference on Legal Trans-lation, Court Interpreting and Comparative Legi-Linguistics

www.lingualegis.amu.edu.pl/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=19&Itemid=33.

12-14 October 2010, Lisbon

Clarity, Clarity2010

www.clarity2010.com/home.html.

9-11 June 2011, Stockholm

Plain Language Association INternational: Establishing the Framework for Plain Language

www.sprakkonsulterna.se/plain2011.

2-4 February 2011, Hyderabad, India

Commonwealth Association of Legislative Counsel (CALC) conference: Legislative Draft-ing: A Developing Discipline

www.opc.gov.au/CALC/conferences.htm


Sir Ernest Gowers

Shortly after the Second World War, the BritishTreasury invited Ernest Gowers to write a train-ing pamphlet for the civil service on the use ofEnglish by officials. The result, Plain Words,was published by His Majesty’s Stationery Office(HMSO) in April 1948. A review in The Timessaid that it “deserves to become a best-seller”. Itwas an immediate success and by August 1950had already been reprinted 12 times.

In 1952, Gowers was invited to address LondonCounty Council teachers on the topic “PlainWords”. The manuscript has been held in theGowers family archives, and is published here forthe first time thanks to Professor Ann Scott,Gowers’ granddaughter and author of his biogra-phy Plain Words and Forgotten Deeds.

I have been asked to speak to you this eveningon the subject of “Plain Words”. That no doubtis because a few years ago I wrote a little bookwith that title. But it is only fair that I shouldbegin with the confession that I am almostwholly uninstructed in the subject on which Iam about to address you. I have never taughtit, and it would be not far off the truth to saythat I never learned it.

As I look back on the now distant days of myown education, there is very little direct in-struction in the handling of words that standsout in my memory. I have dim recollections ofbeing set at a very tender age to do somethingcalled “parsing and analysis”, a form of mentalgymnastic that I thought at the time excep-tionally revolting—though I fancy it may infact have been useful, like the scaffolding thatcan be taken down when it has helped to buildsomething more durable.

I remember, more vividly (it is indeed an un-forgettable memory) being called on at theage of ten to write my first essay, an ordealthat ended with tears of shame that I shouldhave been so poorly endowed by Providencewith the blessed gift of creative imagination—

a misfortune that still depresses me from timeto time, though I no longer show my regret inthe same way.

Later in my school career, I remember clearlybeing taught to avoid the solecism committedby the translators of the New Testament in thesentence “whom say men that I am”. AtCambridge, I recollect being taught not to splitinfinitives and (more usefully) to curb theexuberant rhetoric to which youth is prone.But I remember little other instruction thanthis in the art of expressing myself, though Idaresay there may have been a little here andthere.

So you must make allowances if, to those ofyou who have made a study of teaching En-glish, I show signs of being ill-equipped formy present task.

The doctrine of plain words

I have spent much of what is now a longishlife amid the torrent of words, written or spo-ken, that are the life-blood of our present-daydemocracy, sometimes battling with it, some-times adding to it myself. And I have foundmuch interest in the study of the use of wordsas a vehicle for conveying thought from onemind to another. It was as a result of thatstudy that I wrote my book. I chose its titleafter much thought and rejecting many alter-natives.

In a way, that choice has proved unfortunate.“Plain Words” has become a sort of cliché as-sociated with my name, and I have been takento task by some critics for preaching a doctrineI never intended. It has been said that the cultof plain words will produce a style just as ar-tificial and unnatural, and therefore just asbad, as the use of words that are not plain,if those are a writer’s natural method of ex-pression. Thus I seem to have unwittinglyadded yet another to those vague and dan-gerous clichés that are so rife nowadays, towhich we can all attach any meaning weplease, and so save the trouble of thought.

All I had in mind by the doctrine of plainwords was this: that one ought to be clearabout what one means to say and then say itin a way readily intelligible to the person onesays it to. I advocated it because I could nothelp noticing how much of what is writtennowadays cannot be readily intelligible to theperson addressed—if indeed intelligible at

Plain words


all—and sometimes, one cannot help suspect-ing, not over clear to the writer himself.

I readily concede to my critics the truth thatwords serve diverse purposes, and that forsome of them plainness is out of place. We allknow that Voltaire said that words were givento us to conceal our thoughts, an opinionechoed by the character in one of OscarWilde’s plays who said “Nowadays to be in-telligible is to be found out”.

That is undoubtedly one facet of the truth. Butit is one that needs no preaching. The use ofwords in this way is only too common. It is forinstance part of the stock-in-trade of politicianseverywhere, especially in those totalitariancountries where the rulers are under the hardnecessity of fooling all the people all the time.There, opiate language is used deliberately andscientifically as a means of destroying thepower of independent thought.

You will remember that George Orwell, in hispicture of 1984, imagined a new languagecalled Newspeak, forced on the then totali-tarian world, intended not only to provide amedium of expression for the world view andmental habits proper to the devotees of theconquering doctrine, but to make all othermodes of thought impossible, and indeed ulti-mately to make articulate speech issue fromthe larynx without involving the higher braincentres at all.

That is one of the uses of language for whichplain words are out of place. And there areothers not so extreme. The late C E Montague,who knew more about the handling of wordsthan most people, used to deprecate what hecalled the habit of writers to rub into theirreaders’ minds the last item of all that theymean. A courteous writer, he said, “will havehis non-lucid intervals. At times he will makeus wrestle with him in the dark before he yieldshis full meaning.”

That is all right so long as the courteous writerdoes it on purpose, and is writing for the sortof reader who likes that sort of thing. He mayeven go so far as to amuse himself with intel-lectual exercises such as inventing clumps ofsyllables with a vaguely onomatopoeic sug-gestion, as James Joyce and Gertrude Steindid, and Lewis Carroll before them. No rea-sonable advocate of the cult of plain wordswould quarrel with ingenious experiments ofthat kind. But these things are for poets and

other writers who want to sound emotionalovertones, the very vagueness of which addsto the titillating effect of their impact on thereader. It is not for those who use words formore humdrum purposes.

For like everything else in the modern world,language has changed, not in its structure butin its purpose. It is no longer mainly a vehicleof poetry and emotion; it is a vehicle rather ofscience and journalism, by the discussion ofsocial and political problems, and of the ex-position of the rights and duties of the citizensof the welfare state. The kind of writing I hadin mind when I chose my title is that whichhas as its purpose to convey information, notto awaken emotion—that functional writingwhich so many have to attempt nowadays asan incident of their daily life, and so few canhope to avoid having to read.

Have you observed what a spate we have hadof recent years of books denouncing the styleof writing prevalent today, and purporting toteach better ways? I find it an interestingphenomenon. It is no doubt a healthy one: itreveals a widespread opinion that somethingis radically wrong and a praiseworthy wishto set it right. But one feature of it disquietsme. So many have rushed into the fray, andhave laid about them so indiscriminatingly,that what I may call for convenience the cultof plain words is in danger of being discred-ited by being overdone.

One such book just published made me openmy eyes very wide at the promiscuous way inwhich the author’s lash fell on victims thatseemed to me wholly innocent. He would, forinstance, in his zeal for the language, banishall Latin words, even such old friends, and,as I should have thought indispensables, as adhoc, prima facie and sub judice. That is indeedisolationism run mad. Other campaigners inthe cause of plain words would not, it seems,ever allow any long or ugly words to be used.That again, I think, is excess of zeal.

It is of course one of the articles of the creedof plain words that of two words that expressa writer’s meaning equally well he must preferthe pleasant to the ugly, the short to the long,the familiar to the unusual. But it will rarelybe true that two do express his meaningequally well, and if they do not he must pre-fer the one that conveys it better, be it neverso ugly. A Cabinet Minister wrote to TheTimes a few years ago protesting against the


word “organizational” because it was so ugly.It certainly is no beauty. But if we want a wordmeaning ‘of or pertaining to organisation’what are we to do? We have plenty of indis-pensable ugly words in the language.

Other crusaders again would rule out the useof any words that are not of respectable an-tiquity in the English language. This too canbe overdone: the language is constantly beingenriched by new words. I cannot help feelingthat some of those who have constitutedthemselves defenders of our mother-tongue,from Dean Swift to Sir Alan Herbert, haveshown excessive insularity in their resistanceto what is new. I am not sure that I am myselfwholly free from guilt: I find myself gettingmore tolerant as I grow older. “What is new”generally means something that reaches usfrom the inventive and colourful minds of theAmericans. Sometimes these inventions provemost valuable acquisitions. They should notbe rejected as undesirable immigrants merelybecause of their country of origin, but shouldbe judged by the test of whether they fill a need.

Another way in which the campaign is mis-directed is its excessive concentration on theCivil Service. That is perhaps natural enough.Officials are specially vulnerable; they writeso much, and we all have to read so much ofwhat they write. And as they generally tell usto do something we do not want to do or torefrain from doing something we do want todo, we are inclined to approach them in acritical spirit.

Mocking our officials is a national pastime ofgreat antiquity, and arises no doubt from acommendable trait in our national character.But it can be carried too far. I do not deny thatthe official has a literary style of his own, buton the whole he is no worse than otherpeople—he is better than the business man—and to concentrate the attack on him is unfair,and liable to defeat its purpose by putting hisback up and making him think that the doc-trine of plain words is bunk.

The subject is a delicate one, as I discoveredwhen I first tried to preach the doctrine. Ifound that although some were receptive,many were not. I was indeed warned that anyattempt to teach good English would be liableto arouse the same sort of resentment in somepeople as, let us say, a flaunting of the oldschool tie, as though it were an exhibition ofclass snobbery. That struck me as odd. The

public schools no doubt inculcate many vir-tues, but I have not myself observed the powerof lucid and correct self-expression to be con-spicuous among them. Mr George Sampsonhas indeed gone so far as to say that “what-ever is trained in the average agreeableproducts of the public schools, it is certainlynot the mind”. But that, I think, is a little un-kind.

However that may be, I found it puzzlingthat care about correct writing should be sowidely regarded as pedantry. It is an unusualphenomenon. People generally like to learnthe right way to do things. Those who wantto ride a horse do not think it highbrow thatthey should be taught the correct posture ofhands and legs. Those who want to play thepiano do not regard the proper fingering ofscales as pedantry. That, no doubt, is becausethe would-be horseman and aspiring pianistare convinced that what they are beingtaught are, on the whole, useful aids to con-trolling their horses and their fingers.

There does not seem to be the same convic-tion that being taught the technique of goodEnglish is a necessary aid to a useful accom-plishment. May it perhaps be that this isbecause the wrong things are taught? Or per-haps it would be fairer to put my questionthis way: may it be that the wrong thingswere taught for so long that a resistance hasbeen created which has not yet been brokendown?

The importance of grammar

What do you now teach? I confess to beingdiscreditably ignorant about the answer tothat question. Do you still teach grammar, Iwonder, and if so, what sort of grammar? Ihave been so bewildered in trying to followthe vicissitudes that grammar seems to havebeen passing through that I am no longer sureeven that I know the meaning of the word.

Our forefathers were untroubled by theseperplexities. A hundred and fifty years or soago, William Cobbett said that “grammarperfectly understood enables us not only toexpress our meaning fully and clearly but soto express it as to defy the ingenuity of manto give our words any other meaning thanthat which we intended to express”. That isunequivocal enough. If that were true, ourParliamentary draughtsmen would only haveto undergo a thorough course of grammar,


and a large part of the work of our Benchand Bar would automatically disappear.

The very name grammar school serves to re-mind us that grammar was long regarded asthe only path to culture. But that was Latingrammar. When our mother tongue en-croached on the paramountcy of the deadlanguages, questions began to be asked. Evenat the time Cobbett was writing, Sydney Smithwas fulminating about the unfortunate boywho was “suffocated by the nonsense ofgrammarians, overwhelmed with every spe-cies of difficulty disproportionate to his age,and driven by despair to peg-top and marbles”.

Very slowly over the last hundred years, theidea seems to have gained ground that thegrammar of a living language cannot be fit-ted into the Procrustean bed of a dead one.The old-fashioned notions of grammar be-came a sort of Aunt Sally for any educationalreformers who had a mind to heave bricks at.The old lady stood up with remarkable resil-ience. It is nearly fifty years since the Board ofEducation themselves took a hand in the sport,and threw an outsize brick with the declara-tion that “there is no such thing as Englishgrammar in the sense which used to be at-tached to the term”.

The queer thing is that at the end of it all, weseem to have been left not with one grammarbut with many. We have formal grammar asdistinct from functional grammar, puregrammar as distinct from the grammar of aparticular language, descriptive grammar asdistinct from prescriptive grammar—distinc-tions I will not dwell on because I am notsure that I perfectly understand them. I mustbe content to quote the verdict of the depart-mental committee on the teaching of Englishin England that reported in 1921—a reviewof that subject which, for wisdom and thor-oughness must, I think, still remainunsurpassed. They summed up what theyhad to say about the teaching of English inthese words:

For the teaching of correct speech in schoolwe should rely, first of all, on correction ofmistakes when they arise; secondly on thegreat power of imitation; and thirdly at alater stage, though not in the earliest stage,on the teaching of the general rules to whichour standard speech conforms.

“The general rules to which our standardspeech conforms”. In those words, there is

plenty of room for difference of interpretation.I sometimes wonder whether, in the teachingof grammar, Procrustes may not still be about.I do not know. But I do know that only a fewyears ago, that great authority Sir Philip Hartogsaid he thought that “in the teaching of themother tongue in this country it is still on de-tail that attention is mainly fixed”. Out ofcuriosity, I have dipped into one or two mod-ern textbooks. In the first, the followingpassage struck my eye. The auth

62 24 040710 final...2 Clarity 62 November 2009Country representatives Slovak Republic Ing. Ján...

Documents

Transcript of 62 24 040710 final...2 Clarity 62 November 2009Country representatives Slovak Republic Ing. Ján...