Plain Words (5 page)

All enable you to continue by saying what you have to say as a direct statement, with no unfriendly preliminaries like
I would inform you
.

There remains the second question. To whom are you to attribute the opinions and decisions which, having got over the initial hurdle, you then proceed to deliver? There are four possibilities. To illustrate them, let us take what must today be a common type of letter, one turning down an application. The first of them is that the letter should be written in the first person, and that the official who signs it should boldly accept responsibility:

I have considered your application and do not think you have made out a case.

The second is that responsibility should be spread by the use of the first person plural:

We have considered your application and do not think you have made out a case.

The third is that it should be further diluted by attributing decisions and opinions to ‘the Department':

The Department has (or have) considered your application and does (or do) not think you have made out a case.
*

The fourth is that responsibility should be assigned to a quarter mystically remote by the use throughout of the impersonal passive:

Your application has been considered and it is not thought that you have made out a case.

This is neither sympathetic nor natural.

I cannot pretend to be an authoritative guide on the comparative merits of all of these approaches (no doubt every department makes its own rules), but there are three further points that seem to me important.

First, in letters written in the first person be careful to avoid giving the impression that you are an all-powerful individual signifying your pleasure. If the letter grants what is asked for, do not say that you are making a ‘concession'. If it refuses a request never say, as in the example given,
I
do not think you have made out a case. You should imply no more than that it is your duty to decide how the case before you fits into the instructions under which you work.

Second, it is a mistake to mix these methods in one letter unless there is good reason for it. If you choose an impersonal method, such as ‘the Department', you may of course need to introduce the first person in order to say something like ‘I am glad to tell you that the Department has …'. But do not mix the methods merely for variety, saying
I
in the first paragraph,
we
in the second,
the Department
in the third and
it is
in the fourth. Choose one and stick to it.

Third, do not use the impersonal passive at all—with its formal unsympathetic phrases,
it is felt
,
it is regretted
,
it is appreciated
and so on—otherwise you will seem to your correspondent more like a robot than a human being. How feeble this sentence is: ‘It is thought you will now have received the form of agreement',
compared with: ‘I expect that by now you will have received the form of agreement'.

(5) Be careful to say nothing that might give the impression, however mistakenly, that you think it right that your correspondent should be put to trouble in order to save you from it. Do not ask for information a second time that you have asked for and been given already unless there is some good reason for doing so; and if there is, explain the reason. Otherwise you will make it seem as though you think it proper that your correspondent should have to do what is perhaps quite a lot of work to save you the effort of turning up a back file. Do not use the phrase
Date as postmark
. This will be read by many recipients as meaning: ‘I am much too important and busy a person to remember what the date is or to put it down if I did. So if you want to know you must pick the envelope out of the wastepaper basket, if you can find it, and read the date on the postmark, if you can decipher it. It is better that you should do this than that I should be delayed in my work for even a moment'.

Note
. The phrase
Date as postmark
may be less popular now than it was when Gowers wrote this, but it does survive in bureaucratic writing, especially on printed matter destined to be posted without a covering letter. ~

(6) Use no more words than are necessary to do the job. Superfluous words waste your time, waste official paper, tire your reader and obscure your meaning. There is no need, for instance, to begin each paragraph with a phrase like
I am further to point out
,
I would also add
, or
you will moreover observe
. Go straight to what you have to say without striking a precautionary note, and then say it in as few words as are needed to make your meaning plain.

(7) Keep your sentences short. This will help you to think clearly and will help your correspondent to take your meaning. If you
find you have slipped into long sentences, split them up. This sentence is a long one:

If he was not insured on reaching the age of 65 he does not become insured by reason of any insurable employment which he takes up later, and the special contributions which are payable under the Act by his employer only, in respect of such employment, do not give him title to any health benefits or pension, and moreover a man is not at liberty to pay any contributions on his own account as a voluntary contributor for any period after his 65th birthday.

This sentence contains three statements of fact linked by the conjunction
and
. Because this is its form, no reader can be quite sure until reading beyond the
and
s whether any of these statements has been completed. Only in re-reading the sentence will many people pick up the statements one by one. If they had been separated by full stops (after
later
and
pension
) and the
and
s omitted, each statement could have been grasped at first reading. The full stops would have seemed to say: ‘Have you got that? Very well, now I'll tell you something else'.

(8) Be compact. Do not put a strain on your reader's memory by widely separating parts of a sentence that are closely related to one another. Why, for instance, is this sentence difficult to grasp on first reading?

A deduction of tax may be claimed in respect of any person whom the individual maintains at his own expense, and who is (i) a relative of his, or of his wife, and incapacitated by old age or infirmity from maintaining himself or herself, or (ii) his or his wife's widowed mother, whether incapacitated or not, or (iii) his daughter who is resident with him and upon whose services he is compelled to depend by reason of old age or infirmity.

The structure of the sentence is too diffuse. The reader has to keep in mind the opening words all the way through. The last point explained is that a deduction of tax may be claimed ‘in respect of any person whom the individual maintains at his own expense and who is his daughter', but
his daughter
is separated from
who is
by no fewer than thirty-two words. In a later leaflet of income tax instructions, the same sentence was rewritten to run as follows:

If you maintain a relative of yourself or your wife who is unable to work because of old age or infirmity, you can claim an allowance of … You can claim this allowance if you maintain your widowed mother, or your wife's widowed mother, whether she is unable to work or not. If you maintain a daughter who lives with you because you or your wife are old or infirm, you can claim an allowance of …

Why is the new version so much easier to grasp than the old? Partly it is because a sentence of eighty-one words has been split into three, each making a statement complete in itself. But it is also because a device has been employed that is a most useful one when an official has to say, as an official so often must, that such-and-such a class of people who have such-and-such attributes, and perhaps such-and-such other attributes, have such-and-such rights or obligations. The device is to say:
if
you belong to such-and-such a class of people, and
if
you have such-and-such attributes, you have such-and-such a right or obligation (that is, the device is to use conditional clauses in the second person instead of relative clauses in the third). The advantage of this is that it avoids the wide separation of the main verb from the main subject. The subject
you
comes immediately next to the verb it governs, and in this way you announce unmistakably to your reader: ‘I have finished describing the class of people
about whom I have to tell you something, and I shall now say what that something is'.

(9) Do not say more than is necessary. The feeling that prompts you to tell your correspondent everything when you give an explanation is commendable, but you will often be of more help if you resist it, and confine yourself to the facts that make clear what has happened.

I regret however that the Survey Officer who is responsible for the preliminary investigation as to the technical possibility of installing a telephone at the address quoted by any applicant has reported that owing to a shortage of a spare pair of wires to the underground cable (a pair of wires leading from the point near your house right back to the local exchange and thus a pair of wires essential for the provision of service for you) is lacking and that therefore it is a technical impossibility to install a telephone for you at …

This explanation is obscure partly because the sentence is too long, partly because the long parenthesis has thrown the grammar out of gear, and partly because the writer, with the best of intentions, says far more than is necessary even to make what is said here seem thoroughly polite and convincing. It might have run thus:

I am sorry to have to tell you that we have found that there is no spare pair of wires on the cable that would have to be used to connect your house with the exchange. I fear, therefore, that it is impossible to install a telephone for you.

(10) Explain technical terms in simple words. You will soon become so familiar with the technical terms of the law you are administering that you will feel that you have known them all your life, and may forget that to others they are unintelligible.
Of this fault I can find no English example to equal the American one already quoted:

The non-compensable evaluation heretofore assigned to you for your service-connected disability is confirmed and continued.

This means, I understand, that the veteran to whom it is addressed has been judged to be still not entitled to a disability pension.

I am indebted for the following example to a friend in the Board of Inland Revenue, who also supplies the comment:

I have pleasure in enclosing a cheque for £ …, a supplementary repayment for … This is accounted for by the fact that in calculating the untaxed interest assessable the interest on the loan from Mr X was treated as untaxed, whereas it should be regarded as received in full out of taxed sources—any liability thereon being fully satisfied. The treatment of this loan interest from the date of the first payment has been correct—i.e. tax charged at full standard rate on Mr X and treated in your hands as a liability fully satisfied before receipt.

‘The occasion was the issue of an unexpected cheque,' writes my friend. ‘It is a difficult matter to explain, and an honest attempt has been made. The major fault is one of over-explanation in technical language. The writer could have said:

The interest you received from Mr X on the money you lent him was included as part of your income to be taxed. This was wrong. Mr X had already paid tax on this interest, and you are not liable to pay it again. You have been repaid all the tax due to you.

With this the recipient would have been satisfied. “Treated in your hands as a liability” is an odd way of describing an asset, and the loan was of course
to
Mr X, not from him. “Interest-on-the-loan” is treated confusingly as a composite noun.'

(11) Do not use what have been called the ‘dry meaningless
formulae' of commercialese. Not all of them need warning against: officials do not write
your esteemed favour to hand
or address their correspondents as
your good self
. But some of these formulae do occasionally appear.
Same
is used as a pronoun,
*
enclosed please find
is written instead of
I enclose
, and foolish
begs
are common. The use of
beg
in commercialese is presumably to be accounted for by a false analogy with the reasonable use of
I beg
as a polite way of introducing a contradiction,
I beg to differ
meaning ‘I beg your leave to differ'. But there is no reason why one should apologise, however faintly, for acknowledging a letter or remaining an obedient servant.

Avoid, too, that ugly and unnecessary symbol
and/or
when writing letters. It is fit only for forms and lists and specifications and things of that sort. It can always be dispensed with. Instead of writing (say) ‘soldiers and/or sailors' we can write ‘soldiers or sailors or both'.

Note
.
And/or
is not fit even for ‘specifications and things of that sort' unless used with care. When it is thrown into the middle of the confounding phrase ‘regardless … or not' it becomes positively boggling, as the Department for Communities and Local Government demonstrates in one of its attempts to explain current planning law to the public:

With all building work, the owner of the property (or land) in question is ultimately responsible for complying with the relevant planning rules and building regulations (regardless of the need to apply for planning permission and/or building regulations approval or not). ~

Do not allow
per
to get too free with the English language. Such convenient abbreviations as
mph
and
rpm
are no doubt
with us for good. But generally it is well to confine
per
to its own language, e.g.
per cent
,
per capita
,
per contra
, and to avoid writing ‘as
per
my letter' for ‘as I said in my letter'. Even for phrases in which
per
is linked to a Latin word, there are often English equivalents that serve at least as well, and possibly better. ‘£100 a year' is more natural than ‘£100
per annum
', and
per se
does not ordinarily mean anything more than ‘by itself' or ‘in itself'. Another Latin word better left alone is
re
. This is the ablative case of the Latin word
res
. It means ‘in the matter of'. It is used by lawyers for the title of lawsuits, such as ‘
In re
John Doe deceased', and has passed into commercialese as an equivalent of the English preposition
about
. It has no business there, or in official writing. It is not needed either in a heading (‘re your application for a permit'), which can stand without its support, or in the body of a letter, where an honest
about
will serve your purpose better.