I was reading through Stan Carey’s recent Macmillan Dictionary post on the 2011 Plain English Campaign awards, and he put together some disparate bits of thoughts that had been floating around my head for years now.
I’ve always felt sort of uncomfortable with the Plain English Campaign and other related groups that push for more straightforward writing. These groups, if you’re not familiar with them, look over various writing and call people out for unclear language, excessive wordiness, muddled explanations, and biased euphemisms. All in all, a good thing for someone to do, right? I’ve always felt like it was, especially on legal forms and important things like that. Yet at the same time, I’ve always felt a twinge of discomfort with it, and I never quite figured out why. I finally decided that it must be because of the latent prescriptivism in it, and the fact that I sometimes disagreed with the changes that the groups wanted to make.
But that’s an irrational stand. Surely, I’m not against prescriptions when they are focused and clearly improve the comprehensibility of writing, right? That would be insane. So, I had to wonder, what’s eating me about it?
Judging from his post, Stan has similar misgivings about Plain English, but he’s figured his out a bit better. Pointing out overnight tonight and temperatures really struggling as two examples the PEC has flagged as “weatherese”, Stan calls them inoffensive. Stan grants that overnight tonight is redundant, but that redundancy is mild and potentially useful.* I agree; mild redundancy is something that I believe is useful rather than harmful, as an error-correcting code in language.
But it’s temperatures really struggling that gets to the heart of my misgivings. Stan allows that this is “a bit vague and anthropomorphic”, and it is. It’s confusing if you have no other context, and you need to know this bit of our collective unconscious in which we think of the weather as trying to get warm rather than trying to get cold. (I imagine this directionality is not universal, but variable from culture to culture.**) As a result, if there is no other context, or you’re talking to someone who doesn’t share the same cultural knowledge, you probably should avoid temperatures really struggling.
But avoiding such usages has its own downsides. Language is interesting because it is both a tool and an art. Yes, we could use always just say things the same way every time we talk, in whatever way is the most straightforward and least ambiguous. Or we could be a little laxer and permit variation, but ban metaphorical language, and it would probably be easier to get what people are saying. We could disavow sarcasm, because that’s hard to catch, particularly around people you don’t already know, or people like me who fail to have sufficient differentiation between their regular and sarcastic voices.
But we don’t want to, and I don’t think we should. Language is a fun thing, a way to make art every day, every minute. We read fiction because it’s not the newspaper. We have such a fetish for artistry in language that we store quotations, making whole books of words that someone else put together in the right way. Sometimes these quotations are stored because they’re so clear, but more often it’s because they’re not so clear. “Neither a borrower nor a lender be: For loan oft loses both itself and friend,” from Hamlet, is a great line, one that has become an idiom as a result. But it could have been said much more clearly as “Do not make a loan or take a loan, because loans ruin friendships.”
A reasonable contrarian may be saying something like, “Well, that’s Shakespeare, not the weather report,” and I don’t disagree. But these aren’t categorical differences; we don’t want to say that artistry is limited to plays and creative writing and whatnot. All writing is creative. The question is the balance between artistry and clarity.
I’m realizing this right now because I am occasionally babysitting my two-year-old nephew (actually first cousin once removed, but never mind). That means that I have to re-phrase things a lot, because I do tend to speak like I write, which to be charitable to myself, I’ll call flowery. When I say something with a lot of rare or long words, he just sort of stares at me, and I have to rephrase them in words that a two-year-old might know. But when I’m back to talking to other adults, that sort of obsessive clarity isn’t necessary, and would make me unpleasant to talk to.
Clarity, contrary to what many writing guides say, is not paramount. One should be as clear as necessary, but not always more. If a bit of anthropomorphism makes the writing more interesting and engaging, it may be worth the potential loss of clarity. The same if a spot of ambiguity enlivens the sentence, or a slight omission makes it flow better. The key is to know how clear your audience needs you to be. If they’re non-native speakers or still in diapers, clarity is king. If they’re academics, heave clarity overboard.***
So in the end, perhaps the source of my discomfort with the Plain English idea is nothing more than being wary of making clarity the major consideration instead of a major consideration. Clarity has its place, but there are other factors, and those may be more important depending on the purpose of your writing.
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*: In my idiolect, it’s not redundant at all, because tonight can refer to any block of time between the next sunset and sunrise (most importantly, either to the time before or after I go to bed or both) and overnight could refer to any late night, not necessarily the next one.
**: One example of this sort of expectedly non-universal directionality is time. In most every culture, the past is thought of as being behind you, and the future in front of you. However, for the Aymara, the past is in front of someone and the future behind them.
***: This is not entirely facetious. I once wrote a paper that my co-author worried was too clear; because it was easy to understand the algorithm we were presenting, it didn’t feel like it was a deep insight.
16 comments
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January 17, 2012 at 12:30 pm
Stan
Lots of food for thought here, Gabe. Thanks for following up on my own ramblings on the subject. Last year, in defence of redundancy, I wrote that turning the tautological “there’s dollars there, dollars and bucks and nuggets in the ground” (from The Third Policeman) into a concise “there’s wealth there” would drain the line of colour and life. And your point that a certain amount of expressive leeway should be extended beyond just creative writing is well made.
In a weather forecast, though, clarity counts for a great deal more, and there’s a strong argument that it shouldn’t be compromised by forms of language that a substantial number of listeners will be puzzled or distracted by. There’s also the time constraint, as a commenter said on my Macmillan post. So a lot hinges on context. Public communication from statutory bodies is aimed at a very wide audience, many of whom don’t speak English as a first language (I’m glad you brought that up). So as you put it: “The key is to know how clear your audience needs you to be.”
Something from Joseph M. Williams’s Style that seems apt: “clear writing does not require Dick-and-Jane sentences. . . . [what counts is] how easily we get from beginning to end while understanding everything in between.”
January 17, 2012 at 1:10 pm
Jan Freeman
Gabe, I’ll bet even your own definition of your own “tonight” is too restrictive. Don’t you say “we’ll watch the movie tonight” even if the movie is at 8 and sunset’s at 9?
I don’t listen to much weather/traffic stuff, but it’s so repetitive that it seems natural that it spawns new expressions. I”m quite fond of one local one: I’ve heard “curiosity” as shorthand for “curiosity slowdown,” which itself means a significant backup caused by accident rubberneckers on the unaffected side of a divided highway.
January 17, 2012 at 1:16 pm
mike
It’s not my impression that Plain English folks are trying to stamp out any and all color and variety in language. Or if they are, fie on them.
The issue has more to do with text where comprehensibility is the prime, possibly only, criterion. In such cases, color (and, er, idiolectical English) can interfere. Usual examples include contracts, where few people would argue that language really should be as straightforward as possible. (Some lawyers argue that the conventional language of legalese is both precise and established by precedent, but this is subject to debate.) Or tax forms; if the intended audience (taxpayers) can’t understand the tax forms, then why even bother writing them? Or medical forms. Or the language that pilots use for communications. (To the tower, not to passengers.) Or safety instructions, gah.
I work with technical documentation that’s read in English by many people for whom English is a second (or 3rd or …) language. Knowing this, we make every effort to try to use the most straightforward, unambiguous, syntactically clear language that we can. Although I hesitate to use the term, we have to write for a kind of least common denominator reader. (I hesitate to use the term because these folks are super smart, just not always super fluent in English.) We have in fact explored to what extent Plain English might help us.
As I alluded to, it’s a matter of knowing the audience. If a weatherman* speaks “weatherese” for a local and known audience who understands him just fine, who cares? But if the weatherman speaks weatherese, but his audience is international and people’s lives depend on whether everyone can understand him, well, different thing, eh?
* Who is not needed in order to tell which way the wind is blowing, btw.
January 17, 2012 at 1:33 pm
Jamie
The Plain English Campaign have done a great job getting things like insurance policies and other consumer contracts to be rewritten to be much clearer than in the past (replacing phrases like “party of the first part” with “you” and “we”, for example).
However, I can’t help feeling they have run out of disastrously bad examples, where the language really does get in the way of communication, and are now casting their net too wide. The current phrases they criticize are typical of that. I don’t think “overnight tonight” is necessarily redundant; if “overnight” means over the entire period of the night (not unreasonable for something like rainfall or a change in temperature, say) then you also need to specify over which night it is going to happen, tonight or tomorrow night.
I have never forgiven them for condemning Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns”. As an engineer, I welcomed this as an example of analytical thought of the sort our politicians so rarely employ.
January 17, 2012 at 3:00 pm
The Ridger
http://xkcd.com/191/
I always see this now when I hear people complain about potential ambiguity or actual redundancy…
January 17, 2012 at 5:13 pm
AdoAnnie
I wouldn’t quibble with a double negative or prosy weather reporting, it is the damned Orwellian business speak that I find objectionable. For instance, firing people for budgetary restraints has become ‘out placement.’ Sounds almost pleasant and if I hear the word ‘synergy’ one more time I may feel compelled to pro-actively create a synergistic paradigm shift on someone’s personal space. Some time ago I heard the boss of the company I work for do a Q&A after a talk on quarterly performance. A person asked the boss a question for which there was no really good answer and the boss spoke for 15 mins to say he didn’t really know the answer. It was painful and unkind to force the audience to listen to such high sounding drivel.
I agree that plain English needs to be a goal of contracts, finance and insurance policies and I would add business communication (maybe fiascos such as the demise of Enron could have been avoided if plain speaking had been the rule), but I love the English language, crazy as it is. The temperature can struggle all it wants, but it would be nice here in Southern Texas for it to stay cool just a little bit longer. It’s 12/17, 7:10 PM and the AC just came on for it still being so hot outside. Just a little more winter, please.
January 18, 2012 at 12:51 am
Paul Danon
The BBC’s original was “overnights tonight”, which isn’t even English. Of course language is an adventure and it has its creative side. However, forecasting is supposed to be a public service and, if we can’t understand its output, we can be (at best) inconvenienced. My hunch is that forecasters are actually addressing each other rather than their audiences. They don’t speak about weather the way the public do. It’s not that they use technical terms but, rather, a folksy slang which itself needs decoding.
Do come to my blog for a more general discussion of prescription, especially in the light of Obama’s plain writing law.
January 19, 2012 at 10:01 am
Gabe
Stan/Paul Danon: I’m glad I haven’t put any words in your mouth, Stan. As for the point about clarity being important in weather forecasts, I agree. But a straight weather forecast involves a lot of numbers and probabilities, and I feel like many people find that hard to digest without some sort of friendlying up. Also, with many competing sources for weather, I think there’s also a strong incentive to make one’s weather report distinctive.
Jan Freeman: Yes, your suspicion is correct: that was a much more restrictive definition of “tonight” than I actually have. Which is good, since that increases the importance of specifying “overnight”.
And “curiosity” is really interesting, because I don’t think I’d ever heard “curiosity slowdown” before — and I don’t know if I know of another simple word or phrase to describe it. Hopefully I can adopt it!
mike: No, no, and I don’t think they are trying to remove all the color from English. Their recent examples (as Jamie was saying) sometimes suggest that they might be focusing on flowery language more than bad language, but I don’t think that’s their real motivation. It’s more that I finally realized why I had these misgivings, which weren’t necessarily appropriate.
I also wanted to add that you are the sort of person I was thinking of while writing much of this post — you’re editing writing intended for a smart but not necessarily English-fluent population. This is something that has increasingly been coming up for me as well, as a growing percentage of my friends and colleagues are ESLers, and I do find myself trying to speak two idiolects: one the usual rambling prose I write here and the other a tighter, more direct form for people who might get lost in the ramble. And having been trying to do that, I have all the more respect for your ability to succeed at it.
Jamie: I too mourn for everyone’s dismissal of the “unknown unknowns” discussion.
The Ridger: You make me think I may have to do another one of these posts getting to the heart of my misgivings about constructed languages.
AdoAnnie: Agreed, and yet this business-speak is a siren song. I always tell myself I’ll avoid such idiotic euphemisms, and then the second I step inside an office building, I can’t seem to find any words but them. And I’m awful sorry to hear that your AC kicked on. It’s been in the 60s here and I’ve been bemoaning the fact that I’ll never get to wear the cool winter garb I brought back from Pittsburgh.
January 19, 2012 at 10:25 am
Paul Danon
Thanks, Gabe. Forecasters have a very serious and basic role: to tell us what the weather’s going to be. They’re often short of time. Trouble is, they try to make their presentations too friendly and distinctive and not factual enough. Sure, they have to begin with detailed atmospheric data, but it’s their job to translate that into information that the rest of us can use in real life. Sometimes, all we need to know is whether it’ll rain tomorrow. If it’s going to rain, we need to know when, in terms such as “from 10 am till 2 pm”. It may also be nice to know the temperature if it’s going to be unseasonal. As it is, we tend to get a stream-of-consciousness tone-poem about poorly-specified areas and ill-described phenomena.
January 20, 2012 at 7:17 pm
Daniel
Gabe: I’ve heard a couple of other terms for “curiosity slowdown”. The radio stations here in the Raleigh area tend to go with “onlooker delays”. I’ve also heard of “gawker’s block”, which is probably really cool in dialects where those words rhyme, but that’s not the case for me.
January 22, 2012 at 11:17 am
AdoAnnie
Rubber necking, for instance, “An accident on the Southwest Freeway at Hillcroft has rubber neckers slowing the traffic to a virtual standstill, avoid this area if at all possible.” I don’t know where the term comes from but it is a stable part of traffic commentary jargon that has been around (at least here in Texas) for a long time.
January 23, 2012 at 7:18 am
Daniel
AdoAnnie: The term “rubbernecking” dates to the 19th century, and originally referred to tourists. I’m not sure when it started to be used to refer to people slowing down to look at an accident, except to say that the “tourist” term was still current in the 1940’s. (I say that because there’s a Tom and Jerry cartoon from that time period where Jerry is a tourist in Manhattan and there’s a visual joke about him having an elastic neck while looking at all the sights.) These days, however, I think the “tourist” meaning has mostly if not completely yielded to the “accident onlooker” meaning.
January 24, 2012 at 3:13 pm
Gabe
“Rubber necking”, of course! I can’t believe I didn’t think of that.
January 30, 2012 at 1:07 pm
Angela
I couldn’t agree more with your complaint about “prescriptivism” – and I say that as a plain English consultant. I was a lawyer for over a decade, and only became a plain language consultant after having children, because despite Jamie’s hopeful remark that the plain English movement has run out of disastrously bad examples, there are still just too many AWFUL legal documents being written every day).
I think plain English should be about making things clear, however that needs to be done. The legal advice I’m proudest of was one I wrote to a prison inmate about a complicated tax muddle he’d accidentally created – it was genuinely complicated and I managed to write it in language that made sense to him, and also managed to calm down his extreme anxiety about it. No doubt that advice wouldn’t have passed some of the computer-generated plain English writing assessment tools, but it’s exactly the sort of thing I think all lawyers should be able to write (and generally don’t know how to).
January 31, 2012 at 1:25 am
Paul Danon
Nuclear physics should also be done well, “however that needs to be done” and, in that field, good practices will have emerged, either from experience or experimentation. There will be some English words and expressions that communicate better than others, and they can be helpfully identified. Copy-editing isn’t that vague. It may be arduous but there will be patterns to what editors do.
February 15, 2012 at 2:42 pm
ASG
The reason I don’t like “Plain English” campaigns, which I realize is slightly different from yours, is that it always smacks of a kind of anti-intellectualism to me. When I was writing my dissertation, I would get a lot of huffy comments from outsiders like “why do academics always have to make everything so COMPLICATED” and “why don’t you just come out and SAY WHAT YOU MEAN” and “no wonder nobody buys those boring books” and endless variations on Vonnegut’s “if you can’t explain what you’re doing to a five-year-old child, you have no business doing it.”
As you and other commenters have pointed out, there are lots of situations where that’s good advice, and I’m all for making legal contracts and hospital forms and government documents and yes, even doctoral dissertations, more transparent. There’s a lot of truly abhorrent writing out there. But sometimes, well, sometimes we’re professionals talking about very specific and difficult ideas among ourselves, and at those times there’s a damn good reason for our jargon to exist. I don’t think it’s elitist to say that when you’re working with a community of experts on a problem together, it’s worth using the language you’ve developed in your discipline so that you’re not constantly reinventing the wheel. So when people insist that I simplify everything I say for the benefit of some imaginary two-year-old not-exactly-a-nephew, it rubs me the wrong way.