Writing, Clear and Simple

Update - 18 June 2007: This article is now available as a PDF. Click here to download.

[This article originally appeared in the July 2006 (Vol. 29, No. 7) issue of The Editorial Eye.]

Government communicators are public servants. So it’s a sad irony that their writing style has long been known as bureaucratese, “characterized by buried verbs, passive voice, overlong sentences, and loose grammar. Add to that an overlay of doublespeak and officialese, and you end up with bureaucratese at its finest” (from Garner’s Modern American Usage). No way of speaking and writing could be less suited to the putative goal of service to the public.

Fortunately, an intrepid band of public servants is determined to stamp out bureaucratese. Marching under the banner of plain language, these revolutionary word warriors have been fighting for regulations, forms, brochures, and letters that the majority of us can understand on a first reading.

‘Layman’s language’ isn’t a new idea

The fundamentals of plain language have been practiced by some in the US government for some time. General Omar Bradley, head of the Veterans Administration immediately after World War II, told the people working for him, “When a person writes to [us], he is entitled to an easily understood, frank, and courteous reply. If our replies cannot be understood, they are not only not worth writing, but they simply create additional work.”

President Nixon ordered that the Federal Register be written in “layman’s language,” and President Carter furthered the cause by issuing an executive order mandating that regulations be “easy-to-understand by those who were required to comply with them.” Unfortunately, Carter’s order was not written in plain language, according to Annetta Cheek, the Plain Language Coordinator for the Federal Aviation Administration, and it was rescinded by the Reagan administration (although some government agencies worked on clear writing during the 80s).

The Clinton administration revived the initiative in 1998 with a Presidential Memorandum mandating that federal employees write in plain language and that all new federal regulations be written clearly. Vice President Al Gore led the program, issuing “No Gobbledygook Awards” to federal employees who converted incomprehensible federal documents for comprehension by ordinary citizens.

Today, there are several strong plain language initiatives in various federal departments and agencies, including the FAA, the Federal Register, the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of the Interior, and the Veterans Benefits Administration. While it’s difficult to find hard numbers that describe their overall effectiveness, anecdotal evidence suggests these efforts are working. For example, when the VA revised one letter to use plain language, one regional call center reported that calls for help with the letter went from 1,100 a year to 200. That’s one regional office for one document from one agency.

Why is simplicity so rare?

Annetta Cheek, a leader in the plain language movement within the federal government, recalls, “Back when I got started on plain language, I was working on regulations for one of the Department of Interior agencies,” said Cheek. “A friend of mine who worked on regulations in a different agency brought me this [plain language] regulation that his office was developing. To me it was just amazing because I didn’t know anything about that area, which happened to be offshore oil and gas royalties, but I could understand it and it was easy to read.

“It was so different from any federal regulation that I was used to. I had one of those ‘Eureka!’ moments and I thought, ‘Gee, all regulations should read like this.’” So why don’t they?

It often boils down to inertia, Cheek says: “Writing in plain language is not easy. Particularly when you’ve been taught by the government or some other bureaucracy to write bureaucratically, switching back to a plain, direct style is rather difficult.” Especially when you have a lot to do and little time, “The easiest way to do a report is if you happen to have one from last year. You just update it.” The result is that writers inherit, preserve, and add to the flaws of earlier versions of a document, emulating its “template” bureaucratic style.

Melodee Mercer of the Veterans Benefits Administration says that much resistance also comes from the entrenched culture of an agency or department. “Speaking or writing in a bureaucratic way—especially using passive voice—is something you don’t come into the government doing. You learn to do it and you learn to do it very well, as part of your job. Then all of a sudden people come in and say ‘We’re going to write in plain language,’ and you’re saying, ‘Wait a minute; I got to where I am learning to write this [other] stuff.’”

But John Strylowski, a regulatory analyst in the Department of the Interior, sees a lack of publicity as a major barrier. “Lots of writers simply don’t know about plain language—that they are free to write more accessibly,” he says. “I find that when professionals hear about plain language, they are generally eager to embrace it.” He thinks the public can play a role, too. “It doesn’t occur to most people to demand greater use of plain language in the documents they receive from government and business. If they did, I think we’d see a lot more being done” to head off gobbledygook.

Misconceptions about what plain language is may keep some from adopting it, says Joanne Locke, of the Food and Drug Administration: “A lot of it has to do with being afraid of the whole ‘dumbing down’ idea. [Government writers think] that it’s going to be simplistic, that it isn’t going to be elegant writing. Of course that’s all totally incorrect. It takes a really smart person to take something complex and make it simple.”

Another misconception, especially when it comes to specialized legal writing, is that formal documents need to contain little-known terms of art. In an article in The Scribes Journal of Legal Writing, Joseph Kimble, a law professor and strong advocate of plain language, wrote, “Real terms of art are a tiny part of any legal document. What’s more, lawyers have an exaggerated notion of the extent to which legal terms are precise or are settled and unchangeable.”

For some, wielding bureaucratese is a source of power. “I think the number of people in this category is small but significant,” says Cheek. “People who feel that their knowledge of specialized language gives them prestige, or control, or power want to maintain that. It’s like a club of some sort with its own handshake.”

Some agencies are making progress

Despite the fact that some government agencies remain what Cheek calls “a wasteland,” several agencies have made tremendous progress in implementing plain language. For example, the Veterans Benefits Administration undertook a huge agencywide training effort in 1999, based on the best practices of several regional offices. “The undersecretary at the time decided that we couldn’t have all these [individual] grassroots efforts,” says Mercer. “What we needed was to pull all of them together, figure out the best of them, and make one initiative for the entire agency.”

Using a satellite broadcast, the VBA trained 7,200 employees on Reader-Focused Writing (their name for the VBA’s plain language initiative). How successful was the training? An outside firm evaluated the results; Mercer says, “I think they checked 15 different skills that we taught. People used about three of them in the ‘before’ letters, and 14 to 15 in the ‘after’ letters. And that was a year after training.”

The biggest challenge for the VBA’s initiative going forward? Mercer says, “We had a tremendous amount of momentum when we [first] did this. The training that’s being done now is by site instructors in the individual offices. Probably the hardest part is keeping the momentum going, getting the people who didn’t go through the satellite training to understand that this is a nationwide initiative.”

Others leading the way:

• The Securities and Exchange Commission launched a highly visible effort to encourage companies to file financial disclosure documents in plain English. Their 1998 Plain English Handbook is widely recognized as an excellent resource for plain language writers [give URL].

• In 2002, Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson sponsored an “Interagency Plain Language Forum,” and he also urged widespread adoption of plain language throughout the federal government.

• The National Institutes of Health has a plain language committee and holds a yearly award ceremony for brochures, pamphlets, and Web sites that provide the public with clear, understandable health information.

• The Food and Drug Administration has launched some major projects, beginning with the changes to nutritional labeling on food, and then with the drug information presented on over-the-counter drugs. FDA is revising the drug information presented on their Web site—for both patients and doctors. That effort involves hundreds of thousands of documents.

Several of these agencies and departments have joined forces in the Plain Language Action and Information Network (PLAIN). They meet monthly under the leadership of Cheek to help “ensure that the information written by federal employees is in plain language.” PLAIN members also volunteer to train and assist workers in other agencies implement plain language in their documents.

One recent hopeful sign is the introduction of a bill in the House of Representatives, H.R. 4809, the Regulation in Plain Language Act of 2006. This bill, currently in the House Committee on Government Reform, would require all agencies to write regulations in plain language. As important as that would be, Mercer feels it could go even further. “I would personally like to see legislation written in plain language, because it filters down. If legislation were clear, the regulations would be clear. If the regulations were clear, the manuals and letters would be clear without us having to do all the things we do now to get people to write clearly.”

Most government documents and forms still fail to offer instant illumination—even when they’re published to foster compliance, safety, information, and other noble objectives. But a little idealism can’t hurt. Next time you’re nonplussed by one of the gems bureaucrats crank out, Just Say ‘Huh?’

Sidebar: Plain Language Resources

Here are just a few of the many how-to resources available:

United States

• Plain Language Action and Information Network (PLAIN) - www.plainlanguage.gov

• Plain English Handbook from the Security and Exchange Commission - www.sec.gov/pdf/handbook.pdf

International

• Plain English Campaign (a United Kingdom group) - www.plainenglish.co.uk

• Plain English Foundation (an Australian group) - www.plainenglishfoundation.com

• Plain Language Association International - www.plainlanguagenetwork.org

This article was originally printed in The Editorial Eye, 66 Canal Center Plaza, Suite 200, Alexandria, VA 22314-5507, (703) 683-0683.

Copyright © 2006 Roy Jacobsen. All rights reserved. You can print ONE copy of this article for personal use. If you’d like to reprint this article, send me an e-mail and we can discuss it.