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………
The idea of great American poetry on inauguration day’s a good one. UD thought she’d share a great American poem — one that says things about the sea she’s been trying to say in her own writing. It’s The Slow Pacific Swell, by Yvor Winters.
Far out of sight forever stands the sea,
Bounding the land with pale tranquillity.
When a small child, I watched it from a hill
At thirty miles or more. The vision still
Lies in the eye, soft blue and far away:
The rain has washed the dust from April day;
Paint-brush and lupine lie against the ground;
The wind above the hill-top has the sound
Of distant water in unbroken sky;
Dark and precise the little steamers ply-
Firm in direction they seem not to stir.
That is illusion. The artificer
Of quiet, distance holds me in a vise
And holds the ocean steady to my eyes.
Once when I rounded Flattery, the sea
Hove its loose weight like sand to tangle me
Upon the washing deck, to crush the hull;
Subsiding, dragged flesh at the bone. The skull
Felt the retreating wash of dreaming hair.
Half drenched in dissolution, I lay bare.
I scarcely pulled myself erect; I came
Back slowly, slowly knew myself the same.
That was the ocean. From the ship we saw
Gray whales for miles: the long sweep of the jaw,
The blunt head plunging clean above the wave.
And one rose in a tent of sea and gave
A darkening shudder; water fell away;
The whale stood shining, and then sank in spray.
A landsman, I. The sea is but a sound.
I would be near it on a sandy mound,
And hear the steady rushing of the deep
While I lay stinging in the sand with sleep.
I have lived inland long. The land is numb.
It stands beneath the feet, and one may come
Walking securely, till the sea extends
Its limber margin, and precision ends.
By night a chaos of commingling power,
The whole Pacific hovers hour by hour.
The slow Pacific swell stirs on the sand,
Sleeping to sink away, withdrawing land,
Heaving and wrinkled in the moon, and blind;
Or gathers seaward, ebbing out of mind.
******************************
Any reader can sense, even on a first reading, the writer’s effort to convey something about how the mind works. Maybe the way awareness comes and goes. Sometimes we experience very sharp precision of thought, and sometimes we float into vagueness; sometimes we’re mentally agitated, and sometimes we’re very calm — pacific, if you like. Sometimes we drift very close to the truth; sometimes we’re kept infinitely far away from it.
More interestingly, sometimes consciousness feels like both of these states at once. Like the seawater that washes up on the poet’s ship, consciousness can be a “loose weight” — which sounds like an oxymoron, but water is very heavy, and at the same time without structure. Our thoughts have weight, perhaps, but they are after all merely thoughts.
So, to wade through the poem…
Far out of sight forever stands the sea,
Bounding the land with pale tranquillity.
[Note the last phrase of the poem: “Ebbing out of mind.” The land is where we walk through our lives, grounded, in a familiar world. The sea remains, in its vastness, looseness, and distance, ungraspable, incomprehensible, to us. So say it conveys here the realm of intellectual and spiritual mystery — all that we’ll never understand, however advanced we become. We gaze at it and listen to it because we’re enchanted and intrigued by what we don’t know.]
When a small child, I watched it from a hill
At thirty miles or more. The vision still
Lies in the eye, soft blue and far away:
The rain has washed the dust from April day;
Paint-brush and lupine lie against the ground;
The wind above the hill-top has the sound
Of distant water in unbroken sky;
Dark and precise the little steamers ply-
Firm in direction they seem not to stir.
That is illusion. The artificer
Of quiet, distance holds me in a vise
And holds the ocean steady to my eyes.
[Everything here goes to precision, clarity, the ability to hold something steady in order to see it, analyze it. No dust in the eye; a clear April day; the sky’s unbroken by cloud. Dark and precise the little steamers ply – / Firm in direction they seem not to stir. Glorious poetic concision here, stating something I’ve thought too, gazing through my binoculars at cargo ships in the afternoon, so geometrically clear, heading somewhere full of goods… And yet – he’s right – they don’t seem to be moving. They’re so far away. Sometimes I’ll stare them a long time just to measure their forward progress from place to place; but it’s so hard to see them actually moving as they get somewhere! So another paradox beloved of poets — firm in direction but not stirring.]
Once when I rounded Flattery, the sea
Hove its loose weight like sand to tangle me
Upon the washing deck, to crush the hull;
Subsiding, dragged flesh at the bone. The skull
Felt the retreating wash of dreaming hair.
[Cape Flattery’s “the farthest northwest point of the contiguous United States.” Here all the clarity, precision, and stillness dissolves as the poet’s thrown to the deck by the force of the waves. He’s lost consciousness, briefly, and lies dreaming.]
Half drenched in dissolution, I lay bare.
I scarcely pulled myself erect; I came
Back slowly, slowly knew myself the same.
[The slow pacific swell. So much of our lives we spend dreaming, half-conscious; and then the slow pacific swell of thought and feeling overwhelms us, rouses us to awareness. I came / Back slowly, slowly knew myself the same. Yet the act of awareness — the formation, the swell, of thought — will be maddeningly slow. We’ll be getting somewhere, perhaps — like those steamers — but it’s going to feel as though we’re stuck.]
That was the ocean. From the ship we saw
Gray whales for miles: the long sweep of the jaw,
The blunt head plunging clean above the wave.
[The poet’s skull; and now the whale’s head: The theme of awareness, of consciousness itself as it tries to understand and act upon the world, seems dominant to me in this poem. The whale is a kind of perfection of consciousness; it can lift itself clean above the wave.]
And one rose in a tent of sea and gave
A darkening shudder; water fell away;
The whale stood shining, and then sank in spray.
[Same paradox of consciousness: A shining moment of clarity, triumph over the ungraspable infinite; and then it sinks in spray, back to the deeps.]
A landsman, I. The sea is but a sound.
I would be near it on a sandy mound,
And hear the steady rushing of the deep
While I lay stinging in the sand with sleep.
I have lived inland long. The land is numb.
It stands beneath the feet, and one may come
Walking securely, till the sea extends
Its limber margin, and precision ends.
[I prefer to live on land, where I can feel somewhat secure in my world, though I know that by keeping a distance from the rushing of the deep I remain only half-awake. I don’t confront, or try to take into account, that deeper enigmatic realm that undoes our sense of precision.]
By night a chaos of commingling power,
The whole Pacific hovers hour by hour.
[There’s something frightening – and hence evaded – about the powerful realm of chaos the sea expresses to us constantly.]
The slow Pacific swell stirs on the sand,
[This line wins the alliteration award.]
Sleeping to sink away, withdrawing land,
[Here again things feel pretty ominous. The sea doesn’t merely remind us of the erosion of our certainties; it withdraws land… It actively undermines our sense of solidity.]
Heaving and wrinkled in the moon, and blind;
[Heaving – like the poet himself heaving on the deck under the water’s influence; and – blind. The poem ends with that ultimate image of darkness… And the sea is under the influence, after all, of the moon; and so it is passive, and unable, like the little steamers, to set its own direction. You might have at some point in reading this poem been reminded of Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach, which has a similar theme — the sea in its circular powerful chaos is both a figure for our own sense of spiritual and intellectual futility, and a challenge to us to struggle toward greater clarity.]
Or gathers seaward, ebbing out of mind.
[The poem concludes with the final escape of the sea and all its philosophical challenge; or, rather, with our banishment of the sea, our insisting that it ebb out of our minds so that we can regain a sense of uprightness on solid ground.]
[Maybe you didn’t think of Arnold. Maybe you thought of Elizabeth Bishop – At the Fishhouses. This is how that poem ends.]
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
***********************
Cape Flattery
The president of University of Texas Pan American announced Tuesday she will retire at the end of the month, citing “pressures” that taxed her health and distracted her from leading the university. [Background here.]
Blandina “Bambi” Cardenas will step down after 4 1/2 sometimes turbulent years at the university. Last October, anonymous allegations mailed to the University of Texas System and media outlets around the state suggested Cardenas had plagiarized portions of her dissertation. The senders claimed to be UTPA faculty.
The UT System said in late October it would investigate. But David Prior, the system’s executive vice president for academic affairs, said the inquiry was halted before concluding.
“Once we understood Dr. Cardenas’ intention to resign we abandoned it,” Prior said. Asked if Cardenas was pressured to step down, Prior said, “not to my knowledge.” In a letter to the campus, Cardenas said she informed UT System Interim Chancellor Kenneth Shine of her decision in late December.
Under Cardenas, the university in Edinburg increased the number of students receiving degrees by 58 percent, to more than 3,200 annually. It also raised the number of graduate degrees offered, the number of nursing graduates, the amount of available financial aid and the freshman and sophomore retention rates, according to Cardenas’ letter.
But in 2007, Cardenas had to pay back more than $7,000 to the university she used to pay for landscaping service and install an air conditioning unit, sprinkler system and alarm in her home. She had also been billing the university for mileage for her commute to work…
This story is about faculty persistence. They kept at her, writing anonymously about her, um, unorthodox billing practices, her plagiarism… And she finally decided it would be better for her if the plagiarism investigation didn’t happen. Good call.
From the excellent student newspaper at benighted Southern Illinois University:
… Reports from The Associated Press this week link trustee Frank William Bonan II to $30,000 his father and uncle donated to Blagojevich in November, a month after he was appointed to the board.
Those donations came during a one-day fundraising trip by Blagojevich to Mount Vernon, which netted him $42,000. Of that money, $30,000 came from Market Street Bancshares Inc. and its managers, J. Hunt Bonan and F.William Bonan I.
Records from the State Board of Elections show Blagojevich was the beneficiary of about $25,000 in donations from at least two other trustees between 2005 and 2008.
[The chairman of the board], who was appointed in 2004, contributed $10,000 through two separate donations of $5,000 in 2005 and 2006. Tedrick also contributed another $10,000 through two separate donations of $5,000 in 2002 and 2003.
Trustee John Simmons, a 2004 appointee who is an attorney from Alton, and his wife, Jayne, contributed three $5,000 donations between 2006 and 2008 for a total of $15,000….
The comments on the article suggest that, uh, everybody’s pretty disgusted with this disgusting board.
SIU had better watch it. Corruption levels like these … I mean… look at what’s going on in Greece. People can get really angry after enough of this.
… under-attended loser football team at the mediocre American university. Sure, it’s an empty expensive nothingness — but what other game is there in town? Isn’t it cruel of people to suggest that funds should go elsewhere?
But sometimes you have to put aside emotion and ask the sorts of questions Joyce here’s asking in the Springfield News-Leader:
… According to official reports submitted by MSU, its total athletic spending was $13.9 million in 2007-08. The actual total is somewhat greater, but certain outlays are not covered by NCAA and federal reporting rules.
Slightly more than 45 percent of the total was financed by ticket sales, advertising, NCAA Conference distributions and other “student-athlete” generated funds. Only 17.5 percent of athletic spending was covered by private contributions and endowment and investment income.
The remaining 37 percent of athletics spending — $5.2 million — was the program’s deficit. This is the subsidy provided by students and taxpayers. During these times of financial stringency, it becomes increasingly critical for the university to reduce this subsidy and shift limited resources to academic needs.
It was for this reason that [coach] Bill Rowe spoke of the need for his replacement to excel in “fundraising” — i.e., increasing private contributions above 17.5 percent of program costs.
He particularly highlighted the incoming AD’s need to increase “support for the football program.” Reported costs of the football team were $2.4 million in 2007-08, while private donations were $90,510 – only 3.8 percent of total spending. Meanwhile, ticket sales covered only 7.1 percent of football expenses.
Analyzed as a business, well, let’s not go there. The annual football deficit is $1.3 million.
Analyzed as a sport, the team has produced a win/loss record of 50 percent or higher only four times in the past 15 seasons, and once in the current high-profile coach’s three seasons. (His cumulative record is 12-21.)
Analyzed as entertainment, attendance at home games averaged only 8,958 during the 2008 season, despite the fact that students receive free admission. Even so, nearly half of the stadium’s 16,600 seats sat empty. The situation would undoubtedly have been worse if MSU did not suspend its usual rule against alcohol on campus to permit tailgate parties before each game.
Analyzed from a fairness perspective, 56 percent of all MSU students are females, but they are forced to subsidize –through their tuition — this all-male sport. Also, MSU has ongoing problems achieving compliance with the Federal Title IX rules against discrimination in its athletic program. An appreciation for the spirit of Title IX would go a long way in revitalizing the women’s program.
Analyzed from an academic perspective, only a minority of MSU’s football players typically earn college degrees, and the graduation rate is among the lowest of all athletes on campus. Moreover, the program’s $1.3 million annual deficit dissipates scarce resources that could otherwise be available to bolster the university’s academic programs…
Blah blah blah. You’ve heard it all before on this blog. Team eats shit, mainly drunk students at the games, almost no one on the team graduates, program’s bleeding money, what the hell’s going on year after year…
But you know and I know that a boy and his delusions aren’t easily separated. MSU will stay in the game.
