The New York Times Magazine, Sunday, August 22, 1999

Plainspeak
of clarity, including plenty of plainspoken consultants, are making some progress,
however fitful, in the war against jargon, bureaucratese, technobabble, pomposity
and gobbledygook.
It is an old fight, going back at least as far as Aristotle, but one fought with
particular fervor lately. The results are mixed, but an optimist may be forgiven for
thinking that things are looking up -- if not navigating an upward trajectory.
Patricia T. O'Conner is the author
of a grammar guide, "Woe Is I,"
and a new book about writing,
"Words Fail Me." William Safire
is on vacation.
In the private sector, some hard-nosed business
types have concluded that intelligibility is good for
the balance sheet. Ford, for instance, recently
demystified its auto-leasing contract. Among other
things, lessee has become you, and there's nary a
shall in sight. Linguists at General Motors have
developed what they call a controlled language for use in service manuals. The
idea, according to Kurt S. Godden, G.M.'s translation manager, is to eliminate the
ambiguities of English. And the aerospace industry has invented another controlled
language to standardize the vocabulary of airplane maintenance.
On the medical front, we have the plain-language version of the venerable Merck
Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy, the forbiddingly technical reference book
physicians have been thumbing for 100 years. Take hangnail, for example. "Acute
or chronic inflammation of the periungual tissues" became "an infection around the
edge of a fingernail or toenail."
"This wasn't a simple matter," says Dr. Robert Berkow, who has been editor in
chief of the Merck Manual for 25 years. It took five years to produce a twin
version of the Merck for lay readers, with virtually the same information but in
everyday language. "Most of that first year was spent practicing writing in plain
English," he says.
As for the Government, it has always provided the kind of warm, moist
environment, undisturbed by fresh air, that's ideal for the incubation of verbal
monstrosities. But Washington's antigibberish brigade got a break in early 1997
when it enlisted Vice President Gore in the effort. The result was a Presidential
memo last summer directing Federal agencies to write in ordinary English -everyday
words, short sentences and the active voice. It was a tall order for
bureaucrats used to expressing themselves in language that only another bureaucrat
could understand.
Similar campaigns fizzled out in the 1960's, 70's and 80's, but this one may be
different. "It could really work," says Bryan A. Garner, a plain-language consultant
and the editor of Oxford's new Dictionary of Modern American Usage. "It's
making more official writing accessible." But don't expect overnight results. "It's a
never-ending battle, and you can only change things incrementally."
http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/19990822mag-onlanguage.html (2 of 4) [8/22/1999 9:14:49 PM]
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