Absolute ranking disaster

Happy new year, and let's hope Plymouth can keep winning awards like this in 2013.

Style and substance

I've recently been reading F. L. Lucas's Style: the art of writing well, a rediscovered classic whose basic tenets are nicely summarised here. So far, this blog has mostly concentrated on clarity and concision, and given little attention to writing that is amusing, awful and artificial. Lucas's book is a masterclass in writing prose that is both clear and a delight to read. Here he is on our own favourite topic, the importance of communicating clearly:

For two thousand years Christendom has been rent with controversy because men could not agree about the meaning of passages in Holy Writ; both Old and New Testaments have been more disputed than any human will. The gardens and porticoes of philosophy are hung with philosophers entangled in their own verbal cobwebs. Statesmen meet at Yalta or Potsdam to make agreements, about the meaning of which they then proceed to disagree. Employers and workers reach settlements that lead only to fresh unsettlement, because they misunderstand the understandings they themselves have made. Sharp legal minds spend their lives drafting documents in a verbose jargon of their own which shall be knave-proof and foolproof; but it is seldom that other legal minds as sharp cannot find in those documents, if they try, some fruitful points for litigation. Even in war, where clarity may be a matter of life or death for thousands, disasters occur through orders misunderstood. Some adore ambiguities in poetry; in prose they can be a constant curse. 

For example it seems that, within a few hours in the Crimea, first of all Lord Cardigan's misinterpreting of Lord Lucan's orders wasted the victory of the Heavy Brigade, and then Lord Lucan's misinterpreting of Lord Raglan's orders caused the suicide of the Light Brigade. It is said that Sir Roger Casement was hanged on a comma in a statute of Edward III. And Professor Ifor Evans has adduced the strange case of Caleb Diplock who bequeathed half a million for 'charitable or benevolent objects'. Clear enough, one would have thought — though needlessly verbose. But the law regularly sacrifices brevity to make sure of clarity — and too often loses both. In this case legal lynxes discerned that 'benevolent' objects are not necessarily 'charitable'. The suit was carried from the Court of First Instance to the Court of Appeal, from the Court of Appeal to the Lords; judges uttered seventy thousand words of collective wisdom; and poor Mr Diplock's will was pronounced invalid. Much virtue in an 'or'. Well did the Chinese say that when a piece of paper blows into a law-court, it may take a yoke of oxen to drag it out again.

Nelson Jones once described Laurie Penny's writing (a bit unfairly) as 'not so much a triumph of style over substance as the use of style to obliterate any possibility of substance'. If he wants her to write with better style, more substance and greater clarity, he should start by giving her a copy of Lucas's masterpiece.

Careless communication costs lives

When I first started this blog, I mentioned that I sometimes notice examples of poor communication that aren't just annoying but actively dangerous. Here's an interesting example: a relative of mine was recently given a course of radiotherapy, and was given the timetable I've inserted below.

The last appointment, for some reason, is in black text on a dark purple background that could be quite hard to read and perhaps mistaken for a border and so missed altogether. My relative pointed this out to the nurse, who mentioned that several other people had indeed missed their final radiotherapy sessions (and so, presumably, received an incomplete or delayed dose) as a result of it.

I think we can forgive the initial mistake, but not the failure to fix it once its consequences became clear. The fact that the nurse did nothing to make it more readable makes this report all the more believable. It seems the NHS has some serious problems with communication; unlike with HMRC and other public bodies, the risks are not just to people's time and patience but to their health and lives.

'Poor communication' is very often a political euphemism for a controversial policy poorly implemented, as the NHS recently found with the Liverpool Care Pathway. Here, the ideal scenario would be a sensitive two-way consultation on a complex set of difficult decisions. If this consultation was an intrinsic part of the policy, then the policy failed, even if everything else about the policy was designed and implemented correctly.

Reading those stories, I was reminded of Charles Clarke's claim after the last general election that Labour lost because they'd failed to communicate their message well enough. It apparently hadn't occurred to him that — with the millions spent on press officers, special advisers and widespread advertising — the message had been communicated perfectly well, and that perhaps the real problem was a set of unappealing policies dreamt up by unappealing politicians. (Before I'm accused of any bias, it's worth pointing out that all other parties also lost the last general election, and no doubt for similar reasons but while deploying similar excuses.)

In the case of the LCP, relatives felt the NHS Trusts had failed to consult them properly; in my relative's case, the NHS was similarly inconsiderate in its communications with patients. In each case we can see the potential for slapdash communication — nothing more than the classic failure to fully consider the needs of the person at the receiving end — to cause serious suffering at crucial moments.

I once joked to a paediatrician friend that "if you make a mistake at work children die, but if I make a mistake at work the comma's in the wrong place". I must admit that I hadn't really considered the possibility of children dying because of doctors' inability to put the comma in the right place.

We are all liberals now

With the unsurprising re-election of President Obama, and with voters across the United States endorsing gay marriage and cannabis, we've heard a lot in the last week about the triumph of liberalism. What better time, then, to rid ourselves of an increasingly useless part of the political lexicon?

To a British politics 'n' history graduate like me, the word 'liberal' will always evoke John Stuart Mill's belief that "the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others". It also brings to mind the classical liberalism of political economy that began with Adam Smith and continued through Hayek and Friedman: the mantle that today would be claimed by libertarians.

At first, then, the L-word¹ meant 'being left alone by the government', as economic liberalism still does in Britain, or as neoliberalism now does around the world. Annoyingly, in many other cases it's often unclear whether it still means that or its opposite. We all like to consider ourselves liberal towards oppressive governments, but have very differing opinions on whether a particular government policy helps freedom (by freeing people from poverty, as the liberal left see it) or hinders it (by interfering in people's business, as the liberal right see it).

The waters got muddier after 1906, as Lloyd George's Liberal government introduced pensions and ramped up taxes on the wealth creators/parasites rich. Ever since then, it's been tricky to work out whether British Liberals and their successor parties are really on the left or the right — whether they want fairness or laissez-faireness — a fudge that recently helped get them back into government, but immediately became a problem again once they got there.

In the United States, 'liberal' is today almost entirely synonymous with 'left-wing'; when someone like Norman Mailer describes himself as a 'left conservative', we might take that to mean a Blue Labour-esque position that is conservative on social issues but left-leaning on the economy. I see no contradiction in that, but it strikes us as unusual because 'liberal' is now so often used to mean both left-wing (economically) and tolerant, permissive, etc (socially).

This also leaves us with the problem of why 'conservative' has become synonymous with right-leaning on the economy, particularly when conserving things is often the last thing on radical rightwing minds. I suppose this politico-linguistic problem really took off when the non-left, in Western countries, abandoned the Keynesian economic consensus in the 1970s.

In Australia, meanwhile, the Liberal Party is the equivalent of the US's Republicans (though they generally oppose a republic) or Britain's Conservatives (who are these days pretty liberal). They might be truest to the low church, small state origins of the idea, but we're left with a word that can mean its complete opposite, depending on the country, the context and no doubt the company.

Should we instead use 'progressive' to describe left-liberals, as many of them do? I would suggest not: any political idea to which no-one could reasonably object (in this case, 'progress') is not an idea at all. Similarly, the left in America seem to take offence at being accused (or take offence on Obama's behalf when he is accused) of 'socialism', a term many in Britain and Europe are still happy to use to describe their own set of beliefs. Might 'social democrat' (now a bit out of fashion in Britain) be less offensive, or does that suggest something more Mailer-ish; too much about responsibilities and not enough about rights? Would 'liberaltarian' be the most honest candidate, or is it just too much of a mouthful?

I suggest we seek guidance from the model offered by the excellent Political Compass, refining right and left economically into whether they are socially liberal or conservative (though even they use the rather loaded term 'authoritarian'; illiberalism and authoritarianism aren't quite the same thing, and there are plenty of constitutional conservatives who would pass as civil libertarians). The top left and bottom right of the compass have always seemed to me the most logical positions — either you accept government interference or social norms to constrain your behaviour or you don't — but that's for another post.

The point is that we have to use these terms with care, and should be quick to ditch them once they become interchangeable. Clarity in our political language might then become our best weapon against the lack of clarity in our political thinking.

^{1. [I've capped the L because so many sans serif fonts show a lower case l as indistinguishable from an upper case I: another serious failure of communications if you ask me.]↩}

Period drama

As our American cousins go to the polls, readers of this blog need not fear that important issues like full stops and exclamation marks have been overlooked in the campaign.

And yet, the best communicators are like field marshals, attending to the broad sweep of rhetorical strategy as well as the details of syntax and orthography. Obama was praised for just such 'soaring oratory' in 2008, though inevitably there's been less sign of that this time.

In the end, the result will probably come down to which candidate has done a better job of framing the language used to describe his policies, record and background — and surely no-one can seriously think that leaves us with Mitt '1%' Romney.

Four dishes for the price of six

I noticed this menu at a nearby pub a while ago. Pity the poor haddock and cheesecake, listed a mere once each.

Customs to excise

In recent weeks I've had a couple of dealings with British officialdom. The comparison between the two forms of communication I encountered is quite interesting.

First, I was sent the following letter by HMRC:

Whuhuhuh?

I had quite a bit of difficulty working out from this whether they owed me or I owed them money. I don't mind the inclusion of all this detail — indeed, it might be reassuring to see their working rather than just take their word for it — but I can't be alone in lamenting the lack of a sentence at the bottom of the page along the lines of "your cheque's in the post" or "pay up, pal".

In fact, the information I needed was really spread across three pieces of paper. The covering letter, which I accurately reproduce without paragraph spacing, read:

"I have reviewed your income tax for the year shown above to see whether you have underpaid or overpaid tax for that year.
My calculation is given on the enclosed sheet. The calculation result is given near the foot of that page.
The 'See Notes' column refers to the numbered notes in the guidance leaflet 'Understanding your Tax Calculation' which I also enclose.
A payable order for this amount has been issued to you separately."

Perhaps if I'd known whether a payable order was a cheque to me or a demand for payment from me, I'd have found it all a little more straightforward. It took me a nervous few minutes to work out that they owed me money.

Last week, by contrast, I got a letter telling me it was time to renew my driving licence and that I could either do so in person at the Post Office, or online using the passport photo they already had stored for me. (As an aside, I find not having to go to the Post Office a bigger draw in winning me round to the big brother state than any threats about terrorism or identity theft ever achieved.)

So, I logged on to DirectGov's website, and was certainly more impressed than I ever have been by HMRC. Each page was clear, short, and written in an accessible style, with any important links well signposted. All that was really missing was a section on how to find the paper bit of your driving licence (the 'counterpart', as the DVLA penpushers call it).

It can't be a coincidence that bureaucrats forced to do their business online would end up communicating in much more public-friendly ways than they might be used to (and you can expect to be put on hold for at least quarter of an hour if you're ever unlucky enough to have to phone HMRC). Anyone who goes on a web writing course will be told the same things:

• Stick to short sentences and paragraphs.
• Use keywords readers will recognise.
• Keep it all in plain English and avoid jargon.
• Use short and sensible headlines in large bold text.
• Make sure images are relevant.
• Make sure everything's big and clear enough to read.
• Break paragraphs up with bullet points.

The DirectGov site already does this quite well, but it looks like its replacement will be even more user-friendly.

But here's the thing: all of this works equally well in offline communications. There's no reason why HMRC couldn't instead have sent me a covering letter that got these basics of plain English right, made it very obvious what the financial bottom line was for me, and directed me to the details if I wanted to make sure they'd got their sums right.

I don't deny that tax rebates are more complicated matters than driving licence renewals, but anyone working for any sort of organisation dealing with the public needs to be aware of the importance of clarity and simplicity in communications: especially when money's involved. Here's how I might have worded the letter:

"I have reviewed the income tax you paid for the 2007–08 tax year. I'm pleased to tell you that you paid too much tax that year, and that we owe you £886.83.

Please see the details of this calculation in the attached sheet. If necessary, you can also refer to the guidance leaflet Understanding your Tax Calculation which I have also attached.

We have sent you a cheque for £886.83, which should arrive in [however many] working days. If you have any questions, please see our website at www.hmrc.gov.uk, or call us on [whatever our unanswered phone number is]."

Neoliberal neologisms

This blog post on the Telegraph's site the other day caught my eye. It nicely explains some of the baffling terms financial experts and political economists use, and their self-serving reasons for doing so. We are left, as so often with political and bureaucratic language, with "a form of gibberish in which words are divorced from meaning".

We're already familar with the euphemisms 'quantitative easing' (printing money) and 'negative growth' (recession), but the central bankers create jargon almost as fast as they create money. Many of these new terms are of course abbreviations that demand prior knowledge of their full phrases: QE, ESFS, ZIRP, M1, etc. Orwell once wrote that he was "smothered under journalism"; perhaps today he'd instead feel smothered under acronyms (SUA).

Both sides of the political debate — which, at least in Britain, is increasingly little more than an economic debate — use these rhetorical tricks. 'Social justice' seems to be a clever rebranding of 'redistribution of wealth', and has replaced it in the leftist lexicon as 'tax and spend' has gone out of fashion (which is why it's even cleverer that they don't call it 'economic justice').

On the right, meanwhile, we often hear 'wealth creators' used to imply aspirational entrepreneurs but really to mean the already rich, many of whom collect rather more wealth than they create. Many commentators and even politicians also fail to show much understanding of the difference between deficit and debt, or between tax evasion and tax avoidance.

Perhaps we should always bear in mind HL Mencken's quote: "when somebody says it's not about the money, it's about the money".

The day the police lost control

If ever a manager of a public organisation finds him- or herself wondering whether it's worth hiring a proofreader or copy editor, the following rather important press release should be proof enough...

"On 18th April 1989, 96 of the Liverpool fans went to Hillsborough to watch the FA Cup Semi Final and died as a result of the disaster. On that day South Yorkshire Police failed the victims and families. The police lost control. In the immediate aftermath senior officers sought to change the record of events. Disgraceful lies were told which blamed the Liverpool fans for the disaster.

Statements were altered which sought to minimise police blame. These actions have caused untold pain and distress for over 23 years. I am profoundly sorry for the way the force failed on 15th April 1989 and I am doubly sorry for the injustice that followed and I apologise to the families of the 96 and Liverpool fans. South Yorkshire Police is a very different place in 2012 from what it was 23 years ago and we will be fully open and transparent in helping to find answers to the questions posed by the Panel today."

Ooops.

I get the point

Bullet points have a lot going for them. I, for one, am a big fan of bullets. They are:

 

• a useful way to summarise information
• an eye-catching way of breaking up long bits of text
• they shouldn't depart from the stem of the sentence, like so

 

Like much else, bullet points are very handy but need to be used correctly. I recently sat through a presentation by an officer from a certain department of a certain local council. The presenter gave us a handout containing a copy of the slides, which is always a good idea but left me with a record of a set of bullet points in which almost everything that could go wrong did. I reproduce it in full here:

 

Service Reform – Re-structure

 

North West Area Services will be responsible for:

 

• Developing and delivering programmed activities to meet local need (Play, Youth, Adult Learning)
• Community Capacity Building
• Operational Management of all Community Facilities
• Operational Management of Community Libraries
• Lead on the integrated planning process for local service delivery across the company.
• Lead the introduction of the Strategic Learning Partnerships with Education Services.

 

We'll begin at the top: there's no need to put headings in title case (that is, with the first letter of every main word in caps). Sentence case (that is, with just the first letter of the first word capped, and of course any other proper nouns) is, to my eye at least, much more attractive. It's also much easier to distinguish proper nouns from common nouns and other words, so much easier to read.

 

This seems to be partly a British/American distinction, though for some reason Sky News Have All Their Headlines In Start Case Like So (even including articles, conjunctions and prepositions like 'all' and 'in'). Compare this to the Economist's sentence case, for instance. I find the latter much more elegant.

 

Next, 'Re-structure' probably hasn't had a hyphen since the days of Northcote and Trevelyan.

 

In 'Developing and delivering' etc, I'm not sure 'programmed' aids our understanding very much, but other than that it's not too bad. Again, though, I would suggest that the categories 'Play', 'Youth' and so on need not be capped. In this case they might refer to sub-departments rather than abstract concepts, but we aren't to know that. Either way, unless you're a German bureaucrat, you should refrain from capping ordinary nouns.

 

At 'Community Capacity Building', things start to fall apart. I don't know what this phrase means, or why it's in caps. The next two bullets could probably be condensed into 'managing libraries and other facilities'.

 

Our presenter has saved the classic bulleting mistake for the end: with the two points beginning 'Lead' it becomes clear that she's forgotten how the sentence began. You wouldn't write 'North West Area Services will be responsible for lead on the integrated planning process for...' — unless, for some reason, you were talking about lead, and NWAS really were to be responsible for its presence — so you can see that what the presenter has done here makes no sense.

 

(Then there's the jargon-heavy text itself: is it too much to take for granted that planning processes will be integrated, that partnerships will involve strategy and that management will operate?)

 

It's quite simple to get these right: you just have to pretend that the intervening bullets don't exist, and treat each point as a continuation of the original sentence. Then read each one on its own to check whether it makes sense. In my experience, bulleted lists very often break down in this way after the first three or four points. Perhaps, for that reason, it's a good idea not to overdo it and try to stuff too many points into one list. Putting whole paragraphs into single points can also look like cheating.

 

Note that the last two points also include full stops, while the others don't. This is fine if the point is a coherent, discrete sentence in its own right (which in this case is ruled out by the stem). If so, it should have a full stop and begin with a capital letter, like any other sentence. If it's a phrase rather than a sentence, or an item on a list (like the first four points in our example), it shouldn't have a full stop and needn't begin with a capital.

Another trick for making your list less verbose is to make sure any words that would be repeated at the start of each point are instead put in the stem. So instead of:

'NWAS will:

• lead on libraries
• lead on other unspecified community facilities
• lead on confusing presentations'

we would have:

'NWAS will lead on:

• libraries
• other unspecified community facilities
• confusing presentations'

My final bit of advice on bullets is to consider whether a numbered list might be better, for instance if you need to make it clear that a set of instructions should be followed in a particular order. For all their virtues, bullets can sometimes cause ambiguity on that point.

Busman's holiday

I was trying to get to Glasgow Airport from Partick bus station the other day. The information I found at the bus stop didn't help me much. Can you deduce from this whether or when the airport bus gets to the airport?

The cuts

This story illustrates a couple of rules about cutting and pasting — an issue I encounter all the time in my job as an editor.

First, make sure you're clear about:

• what text you're cutting
• where you're cutting it from
• where you're pasting it to (you'd be surprised how often these first three are overlooked)
• whether copyright rules allow you to do so
• whether it might be better to use new text instead

Second, if you fail to take note of any of these points: make sure there's no chance that the people reading the passage in the original and those reading the copy will compare notes. (This happened to me at university once, when our lecturer gave identical feedback to me and two other students even though we'd written completely different proposals for a piece of work. He ended up looking a bit foolish, at least to us.)

This story also illustrates a point in my earlier blog about confusing nomenclature. Why is the company carrying out inspection reports on Ofsted's behalf called Tribal? It may be that they carry out all sorts of other functions, but in what way does that name describe any of them?

Compare this to, say, the Worshipful Company of Spectacle Makers or (a favourite of mine) the Scottish Association of Master Bakers: you need no information beyond their name to work out what they do for a living. Is Tribal's obfuscation an unfortunate side-effect of trying to sound hip and modern, or part of a deliberate effort to make the important work they do less transparent?

Similarly, compare Ofsted with Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Education, which we still had in Scotland until recently, though always shortened to HMIe. The 'Of-' prefix for official bodies (Ofgem, Ofqual, Ofwat) has become almost as much of a cliche as the '-gate' suffix for political scandals. HMIe is now part of Education Scotland, itself part of the trend towards replacing adjectives or verbs with nouns in names of organisations. Compare Scottish Rugby Union (founded in 1873) with Scotland Rugby League (founded in 1997).

The message remains the same: whenever you use a word — whether as part of a written or spoken sentence, or as a proper noun in a name — it's always worth considering whether there's a clearer one you could use instead.

Arch language

The Olympics haven't officially started, but already we have a report of broken communications. The BBC has the story:

'Outside Lords this morning there are dozens of members of the public trying to get in to watch the archery. They are not being allowed in. This is the "ranking round" where archers attain a score which then leaves them in a certain seeding for the main event. Today's archery is taking place on the nursery ground, not in the main playing area.

But the London 2012 website advertised today's round as "unticketed". Many spectators interpreted that as open to the public and have arrived expecting to get in. One couple told me they had arrived having been told specifically by Locog they could bring their grandchild in.

There is a lot of ill will and bad feeling on the pavement.'

Why did the organisers describe the event as 'unticketed' rather than 'not open to the public'? It seems that even Locog staff, understandably, interpreted 'unticketed' as 'not requiring a ticket'.

This story illustrates perfectly how sloppy language can lead not only to widespread confusion, but also to bad public relations. Let's hope the people running the Games have now learned a lesson about the importance of plain English.

Band words

I enjoyed this recent tale of a communications breakdown (which also features the British jobsworth, a stock character in these situations). The confusion about '4am' is perhaps a forgivable result of the trend for misleading monikers in popular culture. The sturdy [definite article + plural noun] formula for band names — which gave us the Beatles, the Animals, and so on — has long gone out of fashion.

In my youth it was replaced by single short words: Blur, Oasis, Verve, Cast, Muse. As musical tastes have fragmented since then, so have the names performers give their acts, as a glance at any advert for a music festival shows.

One of the common themes now, though, is for bands to advertise themselves as some sort of unrelated organisation: Mull Historical Society, the Victorian English Gentlemens Club, Bombay Bicycle Club. I don't know whether it's a coincidence that these names all share a hint of wistful romance.

It's easy to laugh at the police and council for their reaction in this case, but one can see why 'music from 4am' could be a bit misleading. It also, I think, shows the importance to new acts of choosing a really cool name: would the Rolling Stones, or Motörhead, or Iron Maiden, have ended up playing in stadiums around the world if the most basic part of their brand was less impressive? Or would they still be playing to council officials in village pubs in Surrey?

Good prose is like a windowpane

Welcome to my new blog about language and communications. If you don't know me, I'm Nicholas Mayes and I work as an editor in the education sector in Scotland (teaching those who teach how to teach how to write). My background is in journalism, public relations and parliamentary reporting.

There are already some excellent guides on how to use grammar and plain English online. I hope instead to use this blog as a space for exploring how we communicate: the ways we communicate well and the (often amusing, often annoying, and sometimes dangerous) things that happen when we don't. I plan to share any insights my day job offers, and to give my take on anything that catches my eye in the news. I hope you'll offer some thoughts of your own in the comments.

The title of this post, by the way, comes from a quote from my linguistic and political hero (the two overlap a lot), George Orwell:

'One can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.'

We need not write with a political purpose to avoid these traps, but we do need to write with some sort of purpose. I would offer three simple rules before putting pen to paper:

• Decide what you want to say.
• Decide who you want to say it to.
• Decide the best way of saying it to them.

Once you've done this, you can go about following the advice Orwell offered in Politics and the English Language:

• Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
• Never use a long word where a short one will do.
• If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
• Never use the passive where you can use the active.
• Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
• Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Follow these rules, and your communications will stand out from the meaningless, decorative, purple humbug that makes up so much of what we read and hear every day.