October 13 is the day that was chosen, in 2011, for this celebration of clear communication – being the anniversary of Barack Obama’s signing into law of the US Plain Writing Act. This is seen as the culmination of a series of movements from the latter half of the 20th century that stressed the importance of making public language as accessible as possible, but in fact a recognition of the need for plain expression goes back a lot further than that.
The Royal Society was founded in London in 1660 for the promotion of science, and an important means of doing this was described by Thomas Sprat in his history of the society as being to reject the “extravagance” and “swellings of style” that had become current, replacing them with “shortness” and “mathematical plainness” of expression.
This purpose wasn’t universally admired. Jonathan Swift in his famous satire Gulliver’s Travels mocked the Royal Society’s aspiration to simplify the English language, reducing it to the absurdity of replacing words with objects that you have to carry around with you if you want to express yourself.
A more recent writer, George Orwell, saw the dangers of simplifying language, portraying it as a way to “diminish the range of thought”, which is the stated aim of Newspeak in the totalitarian world of his novel 1984, where people are controlled by the limits imposed on the language they can use. But Orwell was also bothered about what he saw as a growing lack of precision in expression, and formulated a set of rules to prevent this in his essay Politics and the English Language (1946). These include preferring short words over long ones, using active instead of passive verbs, and avoiding jargon.
Linguistic monstrosities
Orwell’s rules are still advocated by contemporary movements in the US, the UK, and across various other languages. Other advice includes the use of personal pronouns to speak directly to your reader, or avoiding turning verbs into nouns (the dreaded process of creating nominalisations where consult becomes consultation, often obscuring who is doing the consulting). These are sometimes called zombie nouns because they drain the life out of language. And they’re not the only linguistic monsters we have to contend with. Frankenwords are formed by unnatural couplings of words. The Plain English Foundation in Australia nominated one such mutant, autobesity, in its list of Worst Words of 2023 .
Proponents of plain language have been careful to stress that their aim is to make the message as clear as possible to its intended audience, not to dumb it down. Conveying technical knowledge and intricate processes will always require levels of complexity that may not be accessible to the general reader. But in areas such as law, politics and business – where the need for common understanding is often crucial – crimes against clear communication are still being regularly committed, as Don Watson lamented in his 2003 book Death Sentence.
And universities are not immune to such linguistic malpractice. Here’s an excerpt from a job advert from the University of Nottingham that was awarded a Golden Bull as an example of gobbledygook in 2022: “The Institute will be an end-to-end platform to drive research and innovation across food systems, to forge such ideas into funded projects, and to enable the delivery of projects, policies, guidance, and innovations with real and lasting economic and societal impact”.
Here's hoping that you’re able to get your message across more plainly than this, not just on October 13, but every day of the year.
Dr Adam Smith is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Medicine, Health and Human Sciences.
