“The buck stops here!”

President Harry S. Truman, quoted in Plain Speaking

My students recently had to review this sample paragraph:

“Your enquiry about the use of the entrance area at the Library for the purpose of displaying posters and leaflets about Welfare and Supplementary Benefit rights, gives rise to the question of the provenance and authoritativeness of the material to be displayed. Posters and leaflets issued by The Central Office of Information, The Department of Health and Social Security and other authoritative bodies are usually displayed in Libraries, but items of a disputatious or polemic kind, whilst not necessarily excluded, are considered individually.”

What is it about written language that calls forth paragraphs like this—when there is simple language like Truman’s? *(See below for important explanation)

Why do even writing students (present company excluded) not realize important basics about good clean writing?

In other writing classes at the University of GuelphHumber in Toronto, I stress the Big Five writing tips and they were also posted in this course. I truly believe that if you look at your own copy, and eliminate these words, you will improve it overnight – and they are applicable to this activity.  Some are quite time-honoured but nevertheless often ignored.

1. Get rid of “of” in your copy. In English, unlike the Romance languages, we have the apostrophe that even Shakespeare favoured: Love’s Labour Lost. In Spanish or French that would be The Labour of Love is Lost, not an especially good title. If you find an “of,” ask yourself whether it can be replaced by an apostrophe. It almost always can. There are six examples of this in the above paragraph and not one apostrophe.

1. Avoid the passive voice. It’s the oldest writing chestnut in the world. From Hemingway to E.B. White, plain language gurus have advocated combing copy and rooting out passives. It’s so simple: just find the word “by.” The ball was thrown by John. John threw the ball.  There is one “by” in the example above. “To be displayed” is an example of a hidden passive, without the marker of the “by.”

1. “Is” can almost always be eliminated. Look at your own sentences and find all the ways you use it. John is the best person for the job and he will begin his new assignment tomorrow. Can be changed to: John, the best person for the job, will begin his new assignment tomorrow. There aren’t any direct examples of useless “copula” verbs (it’s really what they are called) that don’t exist in other languages—in Russian and Hebrew one says, “I Russian” or “I Israeli” and it’s perfectly understandable. In the paragraph, there is a ‘to be’ that could be eviscerated.

1. Eliminate “It” clauses—absent, surprisingly, in this piece. Virtually every sentence that begins with “It is clear that,” or even worse, “I think that” can also start after “that,” usually with an adverb’s addition—“clearly.”
2. Observe CP style: it’s the bible and would take care of ‘whilst.’

Something you won’t find in CP: understand the difference between Latin and Anglo-Saxon words. English has a sorry inheritance of both languages, due to the Norman Invasion in 1066. We are all familiar with those evocative four-letter words that are even called Anglo-Saxonisms. But these words also provide strong words and verbs in our language: here are a few from Fowler’s selection from the letter “D.” Some of them are only four letters, too.

(http://www.ibiblio.org/lineback/words/letter_d.htm)

dark

daughter

day

dead

death

deal

deal

deed

deep

deer

devil

dim

dish

dive

dizzy

do

door

doom

dream

dreary

drink

drink

drive

dumb

dust

Some fairly important words, wouldn’t you say? Yet a full 70% of the language derives from French and Latin. Experts like Fowler have long preferred the Anglo-Saxon, short, direct words do the heavy lifting in our language. Interestingly, according to Fowler—and important for our purposes—“With but one exception, only the active voice was used in Old English.” Hooray. Even “write” by the way is Anglo-Saxon.

That’s where people the above writer and most legal and technical writers become diverted.

I’ve boldfaced and underlined the Latinisms in the sample paragraph:

Your enquiry about the use of the entrance area at the Library for the purpose of displaying posters and leaflets about Welfare and Supplementary Benefit rights (A-S), gives rise to the question of the provenance and authoritativeness of the material to be displayed. Posters and leaflets issued by The Central Office of Information, The Department of Health and Social Security and other authoritative bodies are usually displayed in Libraries, but items of a disputatious or polemic kind (A-S), whilst not necessarily excluded, are considered individually.

Good writers need not be Old English scholars but gaining a sixth sense of what is Latinate or Anglo-Saxon helps writing become the slimmed down, concise, precise prose we seek, whether or not in this course.

One could adopt a kind of writer’s rule:

Latin words, bad; Anglo-Saxon, good.

*Note that in Harry Truman’s “The buck stops here” quote, every single word is Anglo-Saxon and the moralistic “Give ‘em Hell Harry” never swore in public, so no four letter words of that kind for him. (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/h/harry_s_truman.html)

What does all this add up to?

The key to plain language is simple words, plain speaking. The above is all theoretical underpinning and worthwhile to have a greater understanding of why we do the editing we do. All of you no doubt recall the adage that newspapers should be written for the grade eight audience or less. So it is with good PR copy. Simple stuff that’s not hard to understand.

If in doubt, cut it out. That’s my advice. It took several decades in PR and Journalism to understand that. The other single greatest piece of writing advice I’ve learned came from Richard Harwood, Washington Post National Editor during Watergate era. I will leave it with you to ponder. He said: “Use periods more often. They make other words fall away.”

Because I can’t resist, each sentence in the sample paragraph consumes more than 40 words. They should be less than half the length.