The New York Times Magazine, Sunday, August 22 - Unauthorized ...
The New York Times Magazine, Sunday, August 22 - Unauthorized ...
The New York Times Magazine, Sunday, August 22 - Unauthorized ...
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Plainspeak<br />
So it may be a while before every agency's preliminary planning strategy becomes<br />
a plan. Even the Clinton Administration's clarity guru, Annetta L. Cheek, has a<br />
fussy-sounding title: plain-language coordinator. (She prefers to say, "I'm the one<br />
who's supposed to make the Government write better.") She has no illusions about<br />
the difficulties of getting an entrenched bureaucracy to change its ways, but she<br />
says it will happen.<br />
"<strong>The</strong> customers are going to demand it," she says. "It's the right of the American<br />
people to get clear communication from their Government, and they should insist<br />
on it. <strong>The</strong>re's absolutely no reason for this bloated language."<br />
You don't have to be a psycholinguist to understand the allure of officialese. It can<br />
make a lousy idea look good or an unpalatable one easier to swallow. It lets an<br />
insecure writer sound impressive or helps a writer with nothing to say hide the fact<br />
that the emperor has no clothes. But sheer habit may be the biggest factor of all.<br />
Old customs die hard, especially in government.<br />
Carol Florman, deputy director of the office of public affairs at the Justice<br />
Department, finds some of the writing in her agency simply "frightening." Why?<br />
"Not only are we a bureaucracy, but we're a bureaucracy populated by lawyers,"<br />
she says. "<strong>The</strong>y just don't write in English."<br />
But William Lutz, a Rutgers University English professor who writes about plain<br />
language, says his vote for worst writing goes to the Internal Revenue Service.<br />
"Lawyers are a piece of cake," he says. "You haven't lived until you've gone one<br />
on one with an accountant."<br />
Some agencies, though, have distinguished themselves in the battle against<br />
incomprehensibility. Every month, the Administration gives its No Gobbledygook<br />
Award to the employees who produce the most readable document. <strong>The</strong> star of the<br />
effort has been the Securities and Exchange Commission, for getting companies to<br />
cut the jargon out of financial-disclosure statements.<br />
But plain English is nothing if not humble. An Agriculture Department worker<br />
won the award for rewriting consumer tips on safely cooking a stuffed turkey. Her<br />
summation was clarity itself: "Measure the temperature of both the turkey and<br />
stuffing! Don't just trust a pop-up indicator!"<br />
Table of Contents<br />
<strong>August</strong> <strong>22</strong>, 1999<br />
http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/199908<strong>22</strong>mag-onlanguage.html (3 of 4) [8/<strong>22</strong>/1999 9:14:49 PM]