LITERACY MINISTRY TOLD TO
USE PLAIN ENGLISH IN REPORTS
It’s from The Independent.
The Government department responsible for universities is castigated today for its “impenetrable” language “peppered with jargon” in its reports.
MPs on the Commons select committee monitoring the new Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills – which is also responsible for courses in basic literacy for adults – have told its civil servants to use plain English.
It accuses them of using “jargon-riddled phrases” and “euphemisms deflecting likely failure”. It cites part of the annual report, which says the department has a “challenging growth strategy for 2010”: that is, it is unlikely to meet targets. Other examples of obscure language include sentences such as: “An overarching national improvement strategy will drive up quality and performance underpinned by specific plans for strategically significant areas of activity, such as workforce and technology.”
… Even Ian Whatmore, the department’s Permanent Secretary, could not explain what this meant when asked by MPs. The department itself refused to translate it to The Independent yesterday.
Everybody’s covering the story. Let’s see what else they’re saying.
MPs said the department’s new annual report – used to measure its progress – contained so much “impenetrable” jargon that whole sections were “nearly impossible to read or understand”.
Giving evidence to the committee, even the DIUS permanent secretary Ian Watmore was “unable to explain the meaning” of one passage, MPs
Phil Willis, the committee’s Liberal Democrat chairman, said: “We were less than satisfied with the DIUS report, which we found unhelpful and too reliant on promoting a positive tone rather than providing us with clear and comprehensive information.
“While we appreciate that it will take some time for DIUS’s work to be realised, this must not be used as an excuse to produce a sub-standard report. A more concise report written in plain English with independently verified statistics would be of far greater use next year.”
A DIUS spokesman said the department had achieved a “great deal” in the past 18 months and would be replying in detail to the report.
“We are confident that DIUS is well placed to meet the challenges of the future and our work remains at the forefront of the Government’s response to the economic downturn, giving real help now to individuals and businesses,” he said.
Confidently striding forth to meet the challenge of the future, the DIUS is unable, even humiliated for it on an international scale, to write in any other way, you see. Euphemism, cliche, vague reassurance, jargon — Strange to realize that you learn this prose and this pose not merely in American schools of education. This language has the whole ed-world in its hands. We call it eduspeak here. There’s no degree of public humiliation which will change it, because the people who use it don’t understand its criticism. It’s like asking the Australian civil servants who wrote a report about depression what’s wrong with this:
MH-QUERI has partnered with VA organizational leaders to develop a focused yet flexible plan to address key factors to prepare for national dissemination and implementation of collaborative care for depression. Early indications suggest that the plan is laying an important foundation that will enhance the likelihood of successful implementation and spread across the VA healthcare system.
Same lethal bullshit. SOS is convinced a person can die from too much exposure to this. Who wants to live in a world of smiling automata always telling you things are great, moving right along, focused yet flexible? Haven’t we already seen that world in its full smiling flowering?
Yes, comrades, the Five-Year is right on track, focused yet flexible, laying an important foundation whose significant strategy for driving up quality will drive up quality…. You see how this totalitarian writing technique relies on the assumption that you are as much a mindless automaton as the totalitarian writer? There’s a strange intimacy in this approach… It says You’re exactly like me. We’re all alike. We all live within a self-pleasuring fog… We float about within a world of happy psychic stasis, constantly stimulated in a low-level way… It’s okay… It’s okay… says this writing… Everything’s fine… Always has been… Always will be… Things are just fine… And they’re getting even better… Sleep now… Let the fog of my letters envelope you…
To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d.
Yeah… what the hell… bring it… on………
January 21st, 2009 at 10:02AM
"Strange to realize that you learn this prose and this pose not merely in American schools of education. This language has the whole ed-world in its hands. We call it eduspeak here. There’s no degree of public humiliation which will change it, because the people who use it don’t understand its criticism."
Richard Lanham excoriates this kind of writing in his book Revising Prose. According to him, this is the language of a bureaucracy that prefers stasis to action.
January 21st, 2009 at 11:06AM
Filler-text that printers drop into a document to experiment with the layout of a page is called greeking text. Traditionally it was nonsense Latin ("Lorem ipsum dolor sit…"), but there are all sorts of wonderful "Lorem generators" available now that will produce pages and pages of nonsense sentences in marketing-speak, computer jargon, pseudo-German, and (my favorite) management-speak:
"Benchmarking against industry leaders, an essential process, should be a top priority at all times an important ingredient of business process reengineering from binary cause and effect to complex patterns. The balanced scorecard, like the executive dashboard, is an essential tool building a dynamic relationship between the main players. The vitality of conceptual synergies is of supreme importance building flexibility through spreading knowledge and self-organization, to focus on improvement, not cost. Organizations capable of double-loop learning, the three cs – customers, competition and change – have created a new world for business benchmarking against industry leaders, an essential process, should be a top priority at all times."
(One could produce a doctoral dissertation of presidential quality with a few clicks.)
January 21st, 2009 at 4:29PM
There’s a woman who analyzes corporate annual reports for meaningless-jargon content and then compares the results with the future performance of the companies…IIRC, she finds a definite correlation between high gibberish content and lousy future performance.
I thought I had posted something on this on my blog but couldn’t find it..I did, however, find this 2006 quote from UD:
"Crappy writing always ensues when you try to make words do the work of actions."
January 21st, 2009 at 5:17PM
Found the analysis I was referring to above–Linda Rittenhouse runs a company that does this kind of work. Here’s the most recent analysis of candor vs fog.
January 23rd, 2009 at 11:45AM
I work for the federal government. My unofficial job description includes getting the jargon out of important agency reports. It’s a big government in here…I can only hope to change them one analyst at a time!