Plain Words (3 page)

In March 1948, in a debate in Parliament on ‘Government English', Mr Keeling, representing Twickenham, revealed that important official documents had been discovered to be incomprehensible to the general public. He argued that unless something was done about this, the business of various departments would fall into disrepute. He then welcomed the fact that
Plain Words
was about to be published, and hoped that it would help. Mr Pritt, Hammersmith North, could not resist a cutting response: ‘I have often wondered what the Tory party were interested in. They are not interested in getting anything done. But when we are talking about words their attendance is doubled—there are about seven of them'.

It may surprise the modern reader that Gowers soon found himself criticised for being too liberal in his advice: he discovered for himself, what he would later be told by one of the OUP ‘scrutineers' who helped him to revise Fowler, that he would have to ‘mediate between the old hatters and the mad hatters'. The old hatters were disgruntled by his willingness in
Plain Words
to break what they considered ‘the rules', even as the mad hatters interpreted his advice to write plainly as an example of ‘the snobbishness of the educated'. Meanwhile in odd corners of
Whitehall much was made of the impropriety of encouraging junior civil servants to be plain with their superiors.

Though Gowers wrote about ‘rules', he made it clear that he understood them as conventions. His view in sum was this: ‘Public opinion decides all these questions in the long run. There is little individuals can do about them. Our national vocabulary is a democratic institution, and what is generally accepted will ultimately be correct'. How long a given rule might stand was anybody's guess. He therefore advised civil servants, who must write comprehensible English for unknown readers, that they should neither ‘perpetuate what is obsolescent' nor ‘give currency to what is novel', but should ‘follow what is generally regarded … as the best practice for the time being'.

That is all very well, but who can say what current ‘best practice' is? Old hatters and mad hatters continue to broadcast their views. Some believe that Good English, bounded by antique superstitions, is their birthright, to be fought for with the ardour of the Light Brigade at Balaclava. Others dismiss so-called ‘good' so-called ‘English' as a risible manifestation of elitism. It is daunting to have to pick a path between these two camps, yet a fresh revision of
Plain Words
must do just that. Gowers once remarked that if a person were forced to choose, ‘it would be better to be ungrammatical and intelligible than grammatical and unintelligible', only to add, ‘But we do not have to choose between the two'. Perhaps this new edition of his book is best thought of as being for those who instinctively agree, but who seek guidance on the prevailing conventions—so far as they can be discovered—of clear, formal prose.

When Gowers's work first came out, he was praised by
The Times
for his ‘sweetly reasonable' advice, and by the
Daily
Telegraph
for a prose style that was ‘itself a model of how plain words should be used'. After sixty years, it has of course been necessary here and there to modernise both his advice and his writing, and I have attempted to do so, but lightly. There are instances in the original where Gowers's style no longer stands. He starts sentences with the word
nay
, says the trouble
about
X, and that a railway clerk telephoned
to
him. He writes of a subject that
has not
a true antecedent, and of a person's need to make sure he knows
what are
his rights of appeal. None of this sounds quite right any more, and so I have made small changes—what the managers of the London Underground call ‘upgrade works'. Habits of punctuation
and spelling have also altered over the decades. Gowers's
to-day
,
jig-saw
,
mother-tongue
and
danger-signal
become
today
,
jigsaw
,
mother tongue
and
danger signal
;
acknowledgment
and
connexion
become
acknowledgement
and
connection
, etc. His fondness for semicolons, which was striking when he wrote, is even more striking today. Though I am fond of them too, and have left many in place, I have removed about a hundred from the book. There are various misquotations in the original that I have attempted to correct, and I have also very slightly reordered the contents where this makes the line of argument clearer.

News Chronicle
, 14 April 1948

Then there is the matter, mentioned earlier, of the use of
he
,
him
and
his
to stand for everyone. In the line referred to above, ‘make sure he knows what are his rights of appeal', Gowers happened to be invoking the taxpayer; and in 1954 (though of course women also paid taxes) it was standard to use an indeterminate
he
to do so. There are those who still use this ‘makeshift expedient', as it is called later in these pages, but there are others who would never think of it, and yet others who reject it on purpose. (Anyone who vaguely assumed of the London coroner mentioned earlier that she was a man, or who wrongly imagined likewise of the government minister excoriated by the
Daily Mail
that she was a man, must concede that supposedly neutral terms are not necessarily neutral in practice.) In 1965 Gowers admitted that he had spent ‘an awfully long time' worrying over how to revise what he considered Fowler's old-fashioned pronouncements in this area. Half a century on, opinions have moved further still. The indeterminate masculine pronoun, which Gowers eventually settled on calling a ‘risk', is now so widely taken to be in breach of the very friendliness that he so keenly advocated, that I have removed all examples of the use from his writing.

Few revisers faced with decisions of this kind can be so lucky as to have a manifesto by the original author to draw on, but Gowers's preface to his revisions of Fowler provided me with just
such a guide. OUP had instructed him to keep as much of Fowler's original work as possible, but asked him to remove any false predictions, and to make sure that no dead horses were being flogged. Gowers wrote in his preface: ‘I have been chary of making any substantial alterations except for the purpose of bringing him up to date'. And this has been my approach too.

The saddest instance of a false assumption made by Gowers is found in a defence he gave of the word
ideology
. He believed it to be a useful alternative to
creed
, ‘now that people no longer care enough about religion to fight, massacre and enslave one another to secure the forms of its observance'. A few remarks of this kind, and the odd digression that is no longer apropos, I have quietly edited out of the text. I have also removed examples of obsolete advice, such as that a
casualty
is properly an accident and not the accident's victim. But though it was easy to class various small points of this kind as dead horses, where I could not feel sure, I chose to be cautious.

If I have left advice in the book that strikes readers as superfluous, I hope they will feel pleased that they did not need to be told rather than cross that they were. And if some of the current abuses that I mention go rapidly out of date, hurrah for that too. Many people who argue that ‘correctness' is not of the utmost or even ‘upmost' importance will still flinch at ‘organisationalised suboptimalism', and agree that it is worth resisting new words of the type that Gowers called ‘repulsive etymologically'.

In this edition of
Plain Words
,
I
, other than in these few paragraphs of the Preface, is always Ernest Gowers's authorial voice. Any interjection of mine, designed to bring a subject up to date, is clearly marked as a ‘Note', or is a footnote, and finishes with a tilde glyph: ~.

Of course a person revising a usage guide lives in fear of being caught out and found wanting. In his private letters, Gowers wrote anxiously of captious, zestful critics waiting to pick out
errors in his work.
*
I have had scrutineers of my own attempting to save me from this fate, to whom I am extremely grateful, but all flaws of revision in these pages remain my responsibility alone. I do not doubt that I will be thought of by today's old hatters as a mad hatter, and by today's mad hatters as an old hatter, and by both, probably, as a bad hatter: because I dared to tinker with a much loved work, because I bothered to do so, because I did not tinker with it enough. And there is no way to proof oneself against all these objections at once. But what I can say is that in revising a book known over decades for making people smile, my greatest wish was that it should continue to do so a little longer.

For the sheer hard work on this project by many of them, and the encouragement given to me by all, I would like to thank Ann Scott, Patrick and Caroline Gowers, Timothy Gowers and Julie Barrau, Katharine Gowers, Tanglewest Douglas, Raymond Douglas, Helen Small, Mark Kilfoyle, Derek Johns, Bryan Garner, Rebecca Lee and Marina Kemp.

Rebecca Gowers

October 2013

The purpose of this book is to help officials in their use of written English as a tool of their trade. I suspect that this project may be received by many of them without any marked enthusiasm or gratitude. ‘Even now,' they may say, ‘it is all we can do to keep our heads above water, turning out at top speed writing in which we say what we mean after our own fashion. Not one in a thousand of the people who will read our work knows the difference between good English and bad, so what is the use of all this highbrow stuff? It will only prevent us from getting on with the job.'

But what is this job that must be got on with? Writing is an instrument for conveying ideas from one mind to another; your job as a writer is to make the reader grasp your meaning readily and precisely. Do you always say just what you mean? Do you yourself always know just what you mean? Even when you know what you mean, and say it in a way that is clear to you, will it always be equally clear to your reader? If not, you have not been getting on with the job. ‘The difficulty of literature', said Robert Louis Stevenson in
Virginibus Puerisque
, ‘is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.' Let us take one or two examples given later in this book to illustrate particular faults, and, applying this test to them, ask ourselves whether the reader is likely to catch at once the meaning of

Prices are basis prices per ton for the representative-basis-pricing specification and size and quantity.

or of

Where particulars of a partnership are disclosed to the Executive Council the remuneration of the individual partner for superannuation purposes will be deemed to be such proportion of the total remuneration of such practitioners as the proportion of his share in partnership profits bears to the total proportion of the shares of such practitioner in those profits.

or of

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 liability fully satisfied before receipt.

or of

The programme must be on the basis of the present head of labour ceiling allocation overall.

or, to take an example from America, so as to show that ours is not the only country in which writers sometimes forget that what has meaning for them may have none for their readers, of

The non-compensable evaluation heretofore assigned to you for your service-connected disability is confirmed and continued. (Quoted in
Time
, 1947)

All these were written for ordinary readers, not for experts. What will the ordinary reader make of them? The recipients of the last three may, painfully and dubiously, have reached the right conclusions—the particular taxpayer that no more money was wanted from him, the builder that no further labour was likely to be allocated to the job in question, and the veteran that he was still denied a disability pension. But no one receiving the first example could unlock the secret of its jargon without a key, and what the recipient of the second can have made of the explanation given is anyone's guess. Yet in all these examples the writers may be presumed to have known exactly what they meant. The obscurity was not in their thoughts but in their way of expressing themselves. The fault of writing like this is not that it is unscholarly but that it is inefficient. It wastes time: readers are left puzzling over what should be plain, and a writer who bungles the job may have to write again to explain further.

Professional writers realise that they cannot hope to affect a reader precisely as they wish without care and practice in the proper use of words. The need for the official to take pains is even greater. If what a professional writer has written is wearisome and obscure, the reader can toss the book aside and read no more.
But only at their peril can members of the public ignore what an official has tried to tell them. By ‘proper use' I do not mean grammatically proper. It is true that there are rules of grammar and syntax, just as in music there are rules of harmony and counterpoint. But one can no more write good English than one can compose good music merely by keeping the rules. On the whole the governing norms of English grammar are aids to writing intelligibly; they distil successful experiments made by writers of English through the centuries in how best to handle words so as to make the intended meaning plain. Some rules, it is true, are arbitrary. One or two actually increase the difficulty of clear expression. But even these should be respected, because lapses from what for the time being is regarded as correct irritate readers educated to notice errors, distract their attention, and so make them less likely to be affected precisely as you wish. Nevertheless, I shall not have too much to say about textbook rules because they are mostly well known and well observed in official writing.

The golden rule is not a rule of grammar or syntax. It concerns less the arrangement of words than the choice of them. ‘After all,' said Lord Macaulay, ‘the first law of writing, that law to which all other laws are subordinate, is this,—that the words employed shall be such as to convey to the reader the meaning of the writer' (
Edinburgh Review
, 1833). The golden rule is to pick out those words and to use them and them only. Arrangement is of course important, but if the right words alone are used, they generally have a happy knack of arranging themselves. Matthew Arnold was reported by George Russell, his ‘grateful disciple', to have said, ‘People think that I can teach them style. What stuff it all is! Have something to say and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style'. That was no doubt said partly for effect, but there is much truth in it, especially in relation to the sort of writing we are now concerned with, in which emotional appeal plays no part.

This golden rule applies to all prose, whatever its purpose, and indeed to poetry too. Illustrations could be found throughout the gamut of purposes for which the written word is used. At the one end of it we can turn to Shakespeare, and from the innumerable examples that offer themselves choose the lines from Sonnet 33,

Kissing with golden face the meadows green,

Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy …

which, as a description of what the rising sun does to meadows and rivers on a ‘glorious morning', must be as effective a use of thirteen words as could be found in all English literature. At the other end we can turn (for the golden rule can be illustrated from official writing in its observance as well as its breach) to the unknown member of staff of the General Post Office who by composing the notice that used to be displayed in every post office

Postmasters are neither bound to give change nor authorised to demand it

used twelve words hardly less efficiently to warn customers of what must have been a singularly intractable dilemma. At first sight there seems little in common between the two. Their purposes are very different, one being descriptive and emotional, the other instructional and objective. But each serves its purpose perfectly, and it is the same quality in both that makes them do so. Every word is exactly right; no other word would do as well; each is pulling its weight; none could be dispensed with. As was said of Milton's choice of words in the quotation that heads
Chapter VI
, ‘Fewer would not have Serv'd the Turn, and More would have been Superfluous'.

It is sometimes said that the principle of plain words can be overdone. That depends on a writer's purpose. If what you want is to use words to conceal your thoughts, and to leave a blurred
impression on the minds of your readers, then of course plainness will not do. And there may be occasions when prudence prompts this course. Even those who do want to express their thoughts sometimes prefer not to do so too plainly. C. E. Montague, that rare artist in words, once amused himself by tilting against exaggerated lucidity. He said:

Even in his most explicit moments a courteous writer will stop short of rubbing into our minds the last item of all that he means. He will, in a moderate sense of the term, have his non-lucid intervals. At times he will make us wrestle a little with him, in the dark, before he yields his full meaning …

(
A Writer's Notes on his Trade
, 1930)

But the writers for whom this book is intended have the whole adult population as their readers. The things an official has to say are in the main concerned with telling people what they may or may not do, and what they are or are not entitled to: there is no room here for experiments with hints and nuances. No doubt officials do in fact sometimes make us wrestle with them in the dark before yielding their full meaning—sometimes indeed no amount of wrestling will make them yield it. But it is charitable to suppose that this is by accident, not by design.

Just as those servants of the Crown whose weapon is the sword have had to abandon the gay trappings of regimental uniforms and assume the dull monotony of battledress, so those who wield the pen must submit to a similar change. The serviceable is now more needed than the ornamental. A report by a departmental committee on the teaching of English draws the same conclusion. Its authors write that the fact that ‘the hurry of modern life has put both the florid and the polished styles out of fashion, except for very special audiences, is not to be deplored if this leads to a more general appreciation of the capacity of the plain style'. And
‘By “plain” ', they add, ‘we do not mean bald but simple and neat' (HM Stationery Office, 1921).

Although your first requisite as a writer is to know what meaning you wish to convey, you need to choose the right words in order that you may make your meaning clear not only to your reader but also to yourself. As the same departmental report notes, ‘English is not merely the medium of our thought; it is the very stuff and process of it'. Moreover the less one makes a habit of thinking, the less one is able to think: the power of thinking atrophies if it is not used. George Orwell wrote this about politicians, but it is true of all of us:

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself … What am I trying to say? What words will express it? … And he will probably ask himself … Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing open your mind and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you—even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent—and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.

(‘Politics and the English Language',
Horizon
, 1946)

‘Go to all this trouble' is not an overstatement. Few common things are more difficult than to find the right word, and many people are too lazy to try.

This form of indolence sometimes betrays itself by a copious use of inverted commas. ‘I know this is not quite the right word', the inverted commas seem to say, ‘but I can't be bothered to think of one that is better'; or, ‘please note that I am using this word facetiously'; or, ‘don't think I don't know that this is a cliché'. If the word is the right one, do not be ashamed of it. If it is the
wrong one, do not use it. The same implied apology is often made in conversation by interposing
shall I say?
or
you know
, or by ending every sentence with a phrase like
and so on
or
sort of thing
. Officials cannot do that, but they betray their own indolence by their unwillingness to venture outside a small vocabulary of shapeless bundles of uncertain content—words like
position
,
arise
,
involve
,
in connection with
,
issue
,
consideration
and
factor
—a disposition, for instance, to ‘admit with regret the position which has arisen in connection with' rather than make the effort to tell the reader specifically what is admitted with regret. Clear thinking is hard work, but loose thinking is bound to produce loose writing. And although clear thinking takes time, the time that has to be given to a job to avoid making a mess of it not only cannot be time wasted but may in the end be time saved.