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

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