Some years ago my portfolio as a Cabinet member in Kingston Council included Communications. My first act was to set about enforcing the use of Plain English in all communications between the Council and residents. Although leaflets had been subjected to scrutiny, and many had won the Crystal mark, hundreds of standard letters were still written in ‘councilese’. So with the officers I set up a Better Letters campaign, which named and shamed the worst, and awarded plaudits to the most improved letters, as well as providing advice.
One of my favourite sentences appeared in the standard letter telling residents about roadworks in their street. “To ensure that smooth and rapid implementation occurs, I would ask for your kind assistance in the following matters” – in other words: “Please”.
I was thoroughly castigated by the Tory leader, who claimed it was patronising to believe that people would not understand the kind of convoluted ‘Yes, Minister’ style that some local government officers used. I pointed out that it was arrogant to assume that all residents had the same levels of literacy as him, or spoke English as a first language. In any case, some of the phrases used were barely comprehensible to anyone, or required a reading age at undergraduate level.
So it is good to see that, at last, the Government is issuing guidance on the use of language, specifically for material on the gov.uk website. It looks like good advice for anyone who has to communicate with the general public. As the BBC reports, out go jargon words like agenda (unless it is for a meeting), deliver (pizzas, post and services are delivered – not abstract concepts like ‘improvements’ or ‘priorities’), facilitate (instead, say something specific about how you are helping), foster (unless it is children) and transforming (what are you actually doing to change it?).
Good clear communication depends on tailoring your language to your audience. Technical terms are fine for technical readers, but using them when speaking or writing to people who may not know the terms is simply a way of re-enforcing your superiority. When writing for a general audience we all need to use language that is accessible to everyone.
Do please use the comments below to give examples of inappropriate use of council or business jargon by local or central government.
* Mary Reid is a contributing editor on Lib Dem Voice. She was a councillor in Kingston upon Thames, where she is still very active with the local party, and is the Hon President of Kingston Lib Dems.
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11 Comments
One of the things the Cabinet Office doesn’t want to talk about is “policies being delivered” which seems a perfectly straight forward piece of English to me.
I wouldn’t say that a lot of the terms mentioned in the article are technical, or intended to convey a specific meaning which is only clear to experts. They are local government clichés, used by somebody who is (charitably) not clear what they are trying to say or (less charitably) deliberately trying to mislead and obfuscate.
Really, the only guide needed on the use of language to communicate information and ideas is Orwell’s Politics and the English Language. I recommend it to every writer of a Focus or press release.
This press release http://news.merton.gov.uk/2013/01/29/pressrelease-2890/ led to national press coverage that Merton residents were going to have to put their bins out between 5am-6pm of face fines.
What they actually meant was that a small number of residents who lived in flats above shops in town centre areas, who already had a separate system of rubbish collection, were having that scheme tweaked. The Council hadn’t particularly investigated how this new scheme would impact on the people affected, but the press release seemed to imply something else.
or* face fines 🙂
Perhaps the Liberal Democrats will adopt similar PI rules for press releases, briefings etc!
Tony Greaves
what gets to me, as much as gobble-de-gook, is lengthy reports, which must have taken an H4 officer weeks to write, and being in councilese doesn’t get read and achieves nothing.
While we’re about it, can we have an end to the use of “issues” as a euphemism for “problems”?
Also, the lazy usage of “appealing” a decision rather than “appealing against” it is increasingly common.
@RC – I often come across the use of “challenges” as a neologism for “problems”. And the inevitable “leveraging of synergies” to describe two things that can both be done at once. Years of (over)exposure has convinced me that this type of language is characteristic of ignorance, laziness or conceit.
It’s incredibly important that we deliver empowerment for ordinary working people, and build their capacity to face challenges and overcome compliance issues. It’s all about helping people, it’s all about doing the right thing, its all about getting the perceptions right. But a compliance-based environment needs a framework of rules-based parameters.
Meaning – It’s very important that people do as they are bloomin’ well told (by us the superior ‘not ordinary’ people), and accept what we say, or they will be fined.
It is interesting to study publicsectorspeak. Some of it is just poor drafting, using far too many words, too many of them long and off-putting, to convey a message about a temporary road closure, for instance. Others hide dark secrets. For some time in the latter days of the Labour government it was essential to be awed by “the modernisation agenda”. You were not supposed to ask what points were on the agenda. Modernisation could mean almost anything (except replacing vans with horses) and “agenda” managed to give the impression of something systematic and carefully-worked-out, which everybody was presumed to know about, thus avoiding awkward questions. Everyone also had to be “customer-focused”, not a pointless phrase, but begging all sorts of questions about who the customer was and dangerously obscuring the fact that to satisfy one customer (struggling parents, say) might disadvantage or even endanger another (such as their possibly abused child). The modernisation agenda is now old hat, but everything has to be “transformative” or part of, you’ve guessed it, “the transformation agenda”. Transformation, of course, means any big change, for example from an efficient, honest organisation to an incompetent, corrupt one.
There are two sorts of hard to understand officialese. One is the use of flowing phrases and filler words, which are often used to make something sound nicer or conceal the fact that it hasn’t as much meaning as it seems. I can cut that back quite easily – skill learnt under ‘precis’ in ‘O’ level English.
The other is jargon; well defined technical terms are used to communicate precisely within a discipline. All specialities have jargons, including council administration. Councillors and officers can communicate quite effectively with each other in their jargon. However, if they should be communicating with the wider public, they need to be aware of the jargon and, firstly, dispense with the jargon words and secondly those jargon words they must use must be defined.