Entries in Plain Language (3)
Bah, Humbug! Business Jargon Needn't Be a Done Deal
Editor’s Note - I’m trying something different with this article: It’s a downloadable Adobe Acrobat file. It’s licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License, which means you are free to distribute copies of the work. (Click here for more information.)
The Bad News: Business writing is mostly painfully bad. The Good News: We can do something about it. Right-click here and choose Save As to download Business_Jargon.pdf.
Roy Jacobsen
in Business writing, Plain Language
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Scholar Champions Clearer Legal Writing
Legalese is ubiquitous. It’s the fine print on the back of credit card statements, the license agreements for software, the warranties (and warnings and disclaimers) for new products. It often requires a magnifying glass and is considered to be convoluted, impenetrable, jargon-laden writing that is reviled by hapless readers.
But it doesn’t have to be that way, says Joseph Kimble, a Thomas Cooley Law School professor and editor-in-chief of The Scribes Journal of Legal Writing, as well as the author of Lifting the Fog of Legalese: Essays on Plain Language (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2006). Kimble spoke to the Eye about his advocacy of plain language writing.
Roy Jacobsen
in Business writing, Usage, Law, Plain Language
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Plain Language in the Federal Government
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.
Roy Jacobsen
in Plain Language
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