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Archive for December, 2009

The offence of bad language

Posted by Catie Holdridge

Finally, a House of Commons report that is a cause for celebration.

This is Bad Language: the Use and Abuse of Official Language – the result of an investigation into the many ways in which politicians and civil servants may baffle and intimidate readers with their use of jargon-heavy, euphemism-filled waffle. By making such official documents virtually unreadable, the report points out, the public is effectively denied access to political policies that affect them.

The committee behind the report are planning to crack down on perpetrators by issuing penalties for instances where poor use of language has damaging results, like a person failing to receive benefits or services they are entitled to.

And while their plan is to refer to the offence of bad political language by the rather jargon-y term ‘maladministration’, we really can’t do anything but applaud these announcements.

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Posted December 10th, 2009 in Jargon, Language abuse | 1 Comment »

Revisiting that question

Posted by Catie Holdridge

Write Now reader Simon Lewis joins the great ‘that’ debate:

Definitely one of my bugbears, that. Take this example: “The teaching medical students receive also leaves them with an incomplete picture.” I started interpreting this as “The medical students who teach…” — and then obviously realised [that] it was supposed to be interpreted “The teaching *that* medical students receive…”. I’m all for brevity, but not at the expense of clarity, and definitely not at the expense of causing the reader to re-start the sentence!

Thanks, Simon.

So it looks like there needs to be a context-specific clause added to our rule.

If the ‘that’ doesn’t add any clarity to the sentence, as in ‘the watch [that] my father gave me’, then cutting it is fine.

But if the ‘that’ distinguishes the word preceding it as, for example, a noun (as it does for the word ‘teaching’ in Simon’s example) rather than an adjective (which is how Simon interpreted the word to begin with, as a way of defining the ‘medical students’) then for goodness’ sake leave it in.

This does, at least, reinforce the importance of another thing we stand for: proofreading!

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Posted December 9th, 2009 in Grammar, Proofreading | 1 Comment »

Making Words Work