PLAIN ENGLISH—Part
1
1.0 Description (What is plain
English?)
A.
On
page 4 of his Oxford Guide to Plain English, Martin Cutts says:
“Undoubtedly, plain English is a woolly
term. As no formula can genuinely
measure the plainness of a document, I would rather describe
plain
English than define it. In my view, plain
English refers to:
The writing and setting out of essential information in a way
that gives a co-operative,
motivated person a good chance of
understanding it at first reading, and in
the same sense that
the writer meant it to be
understood.
This means pitching the language at a
level of sophistication that suits the
readers and using appropriate structure and
layout to help them navigate
through the document. It does not mean
always using simple words at the
expense of the most accurate words or
writing whole documents in kindergarten
language—even if, as some adult literacy
surveys claim, about seven million
adults in the UK and 70 million adults in
the US cannot read and write competently.”
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B.
A
Plain English Handbook—How to create SEC clear documents by the Office of
Investor Education and Assistance, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
describes plain English thus:
We’ll start by
dispelling a common misconception about plain English
writing. It does not
mean deleting complex information to make the
document easier to
understand. … Plain English means analyzing and
deciding the content
before words, sentences, or paragraphs are considered.
A plain English
document uses words economically and at a level the audience
can understand. Its
sentence structure is tight. Its tone is welcoming and direct.
Its design is
visually appealing. A plain English document is easy to read and
looks like it’s
meant to be read.
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C.
In
Clarity no.59 May 2008 issue, Annetta L. Cheek says:
The basic principle of plain language is
that the intended audience can
use the document for its intended purpose.
And the most certain way to
tell that is by testing the document with
the intended audience. This is
true whatever the language and whatever
the cultural context.
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D.
Plain English is easy to read, understand, and act
upon after just one reading.
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E.
Wikipedia describes Plain
English as
a generic term for communication in English that
emphasizes clarity, brevity, and the avoidance of technical
language—particularly in relation to official government or business
communication.
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F.
PDF
‘The Art of Writing in Plain English’ by Say it Once Ltd says:
Plain English is not about dumbing
down. It is not using words
that are merely simplistic or
childish. It is about writing with your
audience in mind. It takes care not
to assume your audience’s prior
knowledge of your product or
service, or their background knowledge
of your business or your industry.
What it does do though, is to place
the needs of your audience over
other considerations.
It
also puts it in another way:
“A communication is in plain English if it meets the needs of its
audience – by using language,
structure and design so clearly
and effectively that the audience has
the best possible chance of
readily finding what they need,
understanding it and using it.”
This definition was accepted by the
International Plain Language Working Group and was found in Cheek, A. ‘Defining
plain Language.’ Clarity 64 (2010): 5-25
In other words plain English is a
writing style. The language, structure and design of a document all work together
to help the reader understand it at first reading, in a way that the writer
meant it to be understood.
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G.
Simply
put, plain language should be reader-friendly.
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1.1
characteristics
Plain
English is marked by simplicity, clarity and honesty. It’s simple in thought
and expression; it carries within it ideas that are straightforward and
expressions that are devoid of ambiguity; it’s honest in its intent, it doesn’t
doublespeak, it doesn’t hide facts. And it’s has no finality about it for it’s
not an absolute.
Besides,
it’s seen in connection with the writing rather than speaking.
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1.2 The need for
plain English
(Why plain English?)
The
need for plain English was first felt in the area of legal writing (legalese
with archaic
terms, redundancies, awkward phrases, ambiguities) since at least the fourteenth
century—See Stephen Hunt’s "Drafting:
Plain English versus Legalese" [1995] WkoLawRw 9; (1995) 3 Waikato Law
Review 163 and Peter Butt’s Legalese Versus Plain English—1332-1452-1 SM PDF in
Amicus Curiae Issue 35 June/July 2001
Much
later—in the second half of the twentieth century, that is—the need for plain
English was felt in the area of dissemination of ‘essential information’ to the
public through business and government letters and reports, consumer contracts,
product instructions, leaflets and forms on tax, health, welfare and legal
rights, and rules, regulations and laws (p.2 of Oxford Guide to Plain English
by Martin Cutts, Second Edition, 13th impression 2012).
“…clearer
documents can improve people’s access to services, benefits, justice and a fair
deal. If people understand what they are asked to read and sign, they can make
more informed choices and know more about their rights and duties. The might
even see more clearly what business and government are up to.” (p.16, ibid)
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1.3 The history
of plain English
(Where did plain English spring from?)
Let’s
us look at the development country-wise. A case for plain English was made out
to start with in England and the US, and later several other countries followed
suit.
1.3.1 England
The scenario
With
the arrival of Normans in England, French became the language of the elite
including the bench and the bar. But the English wives of French nobles spoke
and taught English to their children. By 1360,
pretty much everyone in Britain had switched back to English – except judges
and lawyers, who kept conversing in French and reading in Latin. The result,
over time, was that English and Norman French were used together. Since two
languages were in operation, the scribes decided to use Norman, English and
sometimes Latin in writing the documents. This resulted in two-word and three-word
combinations like acknowledge and
confess, act and deed, breaking and entering, final and conclusive, free and
clear, goods and chattels.
The complexity of the language increased with the
use of words like aforesaid, herein, hereof, hereinafter,
hereunder, hereinbefore, wherein, whereon, whereas,
therein, thereon, therefore and ad nauseam by scriveners because the scribes were paid by the word. Also because
lawyers got paid by the number of pages of cases they argued in court.The
language thus became long-winded and convoluted.
Attempts to
change it
The
Statue of Pleading by the Parliament in 1362 was the first attempt towards
giving importance to English and it required that all pleas be “pleaded,
shewed, defended, answered, debated, and judged in the English Tongue”. Funnily
enough, it was in French. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a desire
and a wish began to grow in the minds of several including a king –in Chaucer’s
Dreme, William Tyndale’s Bible, Edward VI’s wish, Robert Cawdray’s first ever
English-to-English dictionary, Quakers’ use of plain English, the barrister
George Coode’s attempt, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s call. The second
attempt promoted by Cromwell in 1650 in favour of English as the language of
the legal profession was repealed in 1660 following the Restoration. The
legislation passed in 1730 was the third attempt; however, two years later, it
was partially repealed. It took 700 years of passing legislation before the
United Kingdom parliament broke up its legislation into sections and put in
some headings. Before that it was margin to margin solid blocks of text.
In the 1920s, C K Ogden and I A Richards devised Basic
English, supported by Winston Churchill. But the attempt fizzled out as a force
for plain language in the 1950s. Cornell University professor William Strunk, Jr.
advocated the use of Plain English in his book The Elements of Style was
originally written in 1918 and was later revised with the help of Edward A
Tenney in 1935. In 1946, writer George Orwell wrote an impassioned essay,
"Politics
and the English Language". Two years later Sir Ernest Gowers was asked by HM Treasury to provide a guide to
officials on avoiding pompous and over-elaborate writing. He wrote,
"writing is an instrument for conveying ideas from one mind to another;
the writer's job is to make his reader apprehend his meaning readily and
precisely." Plain
English as a phrase first appeared in the 1974 Consumer Credit Act which
required the agencies their contents in plain English to consumers on request. The
1979 protest (by Chrissie
Maher, one of
the greatest pioneers in Plain English campaign along with Martin
Cutts who
himself is a hero in the Plain English campaign) where unclear government forms
were shredded impacted the Thatcher government enough to issue a white paper
that resulted in abolishing unnecessary forms
and clarifying others. Town halls followed suit with setting up of
plain-English committees. In 1995 the government set up the Tax Law Rewrite
Project to convert tax law into plainer English. In
1999 new rules of civil procedure abolished some time-honoured legal terms for
clearer expressions: a subpoena is
now a witness summons, an ‘in camera’ hearing is now a private hearing, and a writ is now a claim form. Even the venerable term plaintiff has been replaced by claimant.
An inquiry into the 2005 London bombings recommended that emergency services should always use
plain English. It found that verbosity can lead to misunderstandings that could cost
lives.
1.2.2 The US
Early attempts
John Adams criticised legalese and the "useless
words" in the colonial charters. Thomas Jefferson was critical of
statutes for their verbosity, their endless tautologies, their involutions
of case within case, and parenthesis within parenthesis that made life difficult not only to common
readers, but to lawyers themselves. In 1939, Fred Rodell’s, an Yale law
professor, crusade against legalese culminated in a book with a recommendation
that every law be written so that its meaning became plain for all to read. After the world war
II, Jim Minor and others favoured the use of plain language in government
documents. John O’Hayre wrote a book called Gobbledygook Has Gotta Go. Stuart Chase addressed the issue in The Power of Words (1953). Through
his publication of The Language of the
Law, the late Professor David Mellinkoff launched the plain English
movement.
Recent attempts
President Nixon ordered
that the Federal Register be written in ‘layman’s terms’ and thus gave a push
to the plain English movement in 1972. Around this time, the Department of
Education initiated the Document Design Project and, with help from
Carnegie-Mellon University, Siegel & Gale and American Institute for
Research, helped several agencies write plain language documents. The team
brought out Guidelines for Document Designers that served as a handbook for
many years for government writers. The Paperwork Reduction Act was introduced
in 1976. In 1977 Ralph Nader
published an article: “Gobbledygook.” That fuelled public resentment towards
legalese. In the same year, the Federal Communications Commission recommended
plain English to Citizens Band Radios.
In 1978, President Carter issued Executive
Orders intended to make government regulations “cost-effective and
easy-to-understand by those who were required to comply with them.”
However, in 1981, President Reagan left the
decision to each individual federal agency. Vice President Gore declared ‘Plain
language is a civil right.’ He presented No Gobbledygook awards monthly to
federal employees who turned bureaucratic messages into plain language that
citizens can understand. Securities and Exchange Commission's
(SEC) Plain English Handbook
appeared in 1998 that made plain English mandatory for companies
registering securities under the Securities Act of 1933. By 1991, eight states
had passed statutes encouraging plain language. A Presidential Memorandum
by President Clinton in 1998 required federal employees to write all new
regulations in plain language.
The move to use plain English in all communications
continued. FAA has a strong plain language programme of its own. The Office of
the Federal Register has produced two excellent aids to plain language, Making
Regulations Readable and Drafting Legal Documents.
An Interagency Plain Language Forum was started in 2002 by National Institutes of Health which urged its
staff and throughout the government to communicate in plain language. Finally,
in 2008, the Federal Government passed the Plain Language in Government
Communications Act of 2008, which requires agencies to rely on the Federal
Plain Language Guidelines or the SEC's Plain English Handbook.
President
Barack Obama signed the Plain Writing Act of 2010. The Act
requires that federal agencies use "clear Government communication that
the public can understand and use” and achieve full accountability of federal
agencies to the public.
1.2.3
Australia
The
Sentry Insurance car policy and the Citibank loan agreements which appeared in
early 1975 are generally recognised as the first manifestations of the current
plain English movement.
In 1985 the Commonwealth government engaged Professor Eagleson to revise
the forms for social security claims and income tax returns. He also helped the
NRMA to produce a plain English insurance policy, the first of its kind in
Australia. He also published a number of articles on plain English.
The Australian government gave its full support to the growing plain
English movement in
1983, when it introduced the ‘Plain English and Simpler Forms Program’
and in 1990,
International Literacy Year, the government launched several initiatives
to promote the use
of plain English in all sectors.
The Centre for Plain Legal Language was established at the University of
Sydney in 1991
and was one of the few organisations in the world devoted to researching
the use of plain
English.
In 1993 the federal Attorney-General's Department began the Corporations
Law
Simplification Program but it was disbanded in 1997 because it made the
effort more lengthy and complex.
In
1996 the National Board of Employment, Education and Training published ‘Putting
it
Plainly’.
The same year, Mills and Duckworth26 published a study based mainly on their
research into the introduction of a new, plain English divorce application form
in the Family Court of Australia.
1,2,3
Other countries
The
use of plain language in law documents, government rules and regulations,
documents of other agencies like health and insurance has been promoted in Canada, New Zealand, Ireland, Singapore,
Sweden.
However,
India has a different story to tell.
In India,
legalese and officialese is preserved. Mr Jyoti Sanyal, the author of Write it
Right: The Statesman Style Book, wishes that plain English should replace the
commercialese, officialese, legalese, jargon, and circumlocution that characterise
the laws and official documents of various agencies.
In
his article published in Clarity—a Journal of
the International Association Promoting Plan Legal Language—no. 53, May 2005,
Vijay K Bhatia, Professor, Department of English
and Communication, City University of Hong Kong, has this to say:
English is not our first language in India. But the
union government,
the judiciary and the state governments
at the higher levels conduct
their business in English... But no
attempt seems to have been made…
to simplify the English used by
government agencies. The Plain English
Movement seems to have left the
shores of India untouched.
In his Foreword to Jyoti Sanyal’s INDLISH Reprint
2007 published by Viva Books Private Limited, New Delhi, Martin Cutts has this
to say:
“At
the request of the Federation of Consumer Organisations of Tamil
Nadu,
I visited four times in the 1990s to give lectures and workshops
for
the British Council for clarity in business and official writing. …
I
came, I talked, I sowed a few seeds …but I fear I conquered not.
There was no vigorous flowering of plain
language in Indian education,
journalism
or business.”
In his article, Towards a lingua franca for India, published in
Clarity, no.59, May 2008, Jyoti Sanyal, argues that plain language cannot take off
in India as its linguistic scenario doesn’t permit it. For plain language to be
possible, Indians must speak a common language but they don’t. Hindi the
official language cannot be understood by the Southern States. The official
Hindi is heavily sanskritised and so cannot be understood by the common man in
Northern States because their Hindi is Hindustani, which is a mixture of Hindi
and Urdu. Even the Right to Information Act that came into existence only in 2005 is
worded in obscure legalese of the 18th century. Not because people are
too stupid to simplify obscure language, but because such effort is never
considered necessary where feudal ideas persist. And only 4% of Indians (a
country of 1.3 billion people) use English. Although that works out to around
40 million, it means using what could be a ‘closed language’ for 96% of
Indians.
However, Mr
Sanyal also spearheaded the Plain English movement in India, and towards this
cause founded Clear English India (http://www.clearenglish.in/) in 2005. Clear
English India believes that that it is possible and necessary to write in plain
language at all times. It demands that
the government should draft all laws in plain English and also in plain
regional languages and make them accessible to the public because they have a right to know and understand what the
law says without assistance from lawyers or officials.
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1.3 Efficacy
of plain English (Does
plain English work?)
Readers
of documents written in plain English said they were more comfortable with them
than the traditional ones. This was clearly indicated by (1) an American study
of instructions given by word of mouth to jurors, (2) testing understanding of
medical consent forms in the US, (3) the Social Security Administration’s
annual benefit statement. The experience in the UK was along similar lines.
Plain Language Commission successfully tested Cutts’ Clearer Timeshare act with
90 senior law students; consequently, the UK tax department formed two groups
to rewrite tax laws into plainer English. Surveys and studies conducted in the
US revealed that readers were comfortable with the documents written in plain
English.
Sources
For 1.0,
1.1., 1.2 and 1.3:
1. Martin
Cutts. Oxford Guide to Plain English. OUP 2012
2.
History of Plain English at http://plainenglish.net.in/history-of-plain-english
3. John
Pease’s Plain English presented at ACLA National Conference at Queensland in
November 2012
4.
Mark Cohen’s A Brief History of “Legalese” and the Plain English Movement at
5. Column on June 1, 2002: A brief history of plain
English at
6. Joanne Locke. A History of Plain Language in the
United States Government (2004) at
7.
Joyti Sanyal. Towards a lingua
franca for India. Clarity-- a Journal of the International
Association Promoting Plan Legal Language,
no 59, May 2008
8. Vijay K. Bhatia. Plain English in Asia. Clarity—a Journal of the International Association
8. Vijay K. Bhatia. Plain English in Asia. Clarity—a Journal of the International Association
Promoting Plan Legal Language, no 53, May
2005
9. Wikipedia
10. Clarity is an international association promoting plain legal language
This Association publishes a journal
named Clarity that discusses issues related to plain
language.
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