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gobbledygook that smalltalkers can understand (second prize)
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| alexis rzewski 2004-07-28, 9:08 pm |
| Jargon-busters pick top offenders after 25 years of rewriting history
John Ezard, arts correspondent
Monday July 26, 2004
The Guardian
The Plain English Campaign today celebrates the anniversary of a
mission as vital, unglamorous and unending as sewage disposal. For a
quarter of a century, it has been struggling to cleanse the muck of
jargon and circumlocution from British official writing.
The campaign was co-founded with the vehemence of a cru e by
Chrissie Maher, a Liverpool woman furious because the official forms
she received were indecipherable. Its combined tactic of public
ridicule and backstairs training for repentant organisations can claim
credit for the clearer forms and leaflets now seen in many health
clinics, post offices and government ministries.
Yesterday its 7,000 supporters in 80 countries marked the anniversary
by nominating their choicest item of gobbledygook from the last 25
years.
The winner is a sentence from draft national minimum wage regulations
introduced by Tony Blair's government in 1998.
John Lister, campaign spokesman said: "It shows that even everyday
words of one or two syllables can cause confusion when they are poorly
chosen."
The campaign pays its costs by working as a consultant for
organisations eager to improve communication with the public. Its
success in this job has inspired several rivals. Yesterday one of
these, Emphasis Training, conceded that the Plain English Campaign's
high-profile crue had simplified the way businesses wrote to
consumers. "Unfortunately, the same isn't true of business documents,"
said Rob Ashton, an Emphasis director. "UK businesses waste billions
every year paying people to write documents that their colleagues
struggle to - or never - read".
Mr Ashton added that an Emphasis survey of 150 companies found they
felt an average of 17% of the documents they received were badly
written, with emails the worst.
Sixty-four per cent of companies cited emails, with end-of-year
reports, letters, web texts and technical language as the next worst
offenders.
Faults regarded as most vexing were bad punctuation (34%), bad
spelling (31%), jargon (10%), "generally hard to understand" (16%) and
misuse of words (8%). Unexplained acronyms and unclear technical terms
also caused anger. Emphasis has issued a dictionary of the 131 most
misused terms.
Mr Ashton cited a recent company document inviting tenders.
"Description/objective of the contract: to provide evidence on the
extent to which north-west organisation's needs for enhanced and
modified skills and knowledge among their existing adult employees are
being met."
The author of the tender document should have written, according to Mr
Ashton: "We want to discover how much employees of companies in the
north-west have improved their skills and knowledge".
An equally bad example was a Department of Health guidance document:
"The aim of this resource pack is to help organisations promote and
implement the use of an HR Leadership Qualities Framework that
describes those behaviours which enhance NHS HR capacity and
capability to improve the patient experience".
This should have read, according to Mr Ashton: "This resource pack
will help NHS organisations promote and introduce a Human Resources
Leadership Qualities Framework. The framework will assist NHS HR
departments in improving the patient experience".
He said: "Concise writing means calling a spade a spade, not a manual
earth-moving implement."
The winners
1st
1989 National minimum wage regulations
The hours of non-hours work worked by a worker in a pay reference
period shall be the total of the number of hours spent by him during
the pay reference period in carrying out the duties required of him
under his contract to do non-hours work
2nd
1989 STC Technology Ltd document
There is an unavoidable conflict of terminology in naming the classes
Class and Instantation. Instantation is not itself a real instance but
a class (namely, the class of all real instances). Likewise, Class is
not a class of real instances but a class of classes (namely, the
class of all classes of real instances). Instantation could be renamed
Class and Class renamed Type to avoid this. In that case, the members
of Class would not be classes and the members of Type would not be
types.
3rd
1982 letter from the Department of Health and Social Security
From and including 26.2.81 an additional component is payable at the
w ly rate of 5p which is the rate appropriate to 11/4% of the amount
of the surpluses in the earnings factors for 3 years in the claimant's
working life after reduction on account of his guaranteed minimum
pension of £2.04 (the guaranteed minimum pension was originally
notified to the claimant as £1.99 and has subsequently been amended to
£2.04) (Social Security Pensions Act 1975 Section 6 and 29 (1) and the
Social Security (Earnings Factor) Regulations reg 2 and the Schedule)
and graduated retirement benefit at the wly rate of £2.37 (£2.58
from 26.2.81) which is the amount appropriate to 67 units of graduated
contributions paid or treated as paid by the claimant (National
Insurance Act 1965 Section 36 and the Social Security (Graduated
Retirement Benefit) (No.2) Regulations reg 3 (3) and Schedule 1)
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| Niall Ross 2004-07-30, 8:56 pm |
| Dear Alexis,
I actually know quite a lot about this paragraph. The original author
worked down the hall from me back in the eighties, and the text first
appeared in a draft document I reviewed (I didn't work on the project but
the firm's culture was to get reviewers from other projects).
Their project was a tool-integration framework for coding and network
management tasks. As they did not write the framework in Smalltalk, they
had to create basic meta-class concepts and infrastructure. They had
specific tool integration factory classes that they generated, and generic
factory classes to do the generating. Then they needed objects to manage
these two factory collections, which is where the classes talked about in
the paragraph came in.
A first draft of the design, written (I suspect) after a meeting debated
what to call these objects, included these remarks. As part of putting the
draft into a hypertext system (to assist review), I dumped all the
design-decision-rationale text into pop-up hyperlinks that you saw only if
you requested background on a given item in the main document.
By various routes, this draft was sent with other documents to a UK Atomic
Energy Authority manager associated with the work. He couldn't work the
hypertext, so printed the document in a way that put all the
decision-rationale notes out of context at the end, with this being the very
last paragraph. We're not sure if he read anything else in the document.
We're quite sure his problems with the new-fangled concept of
object-orientation were not all caused by anyone's poor phrasing. (He was
sure OO was a stupid idea, a fad that wouldn't last.) He sent the paragraph
to the plain English campaign. Meanwhile, the paragraph got dropped in the
review, so it wasn't in the next draft of the document.
When news of the plain English award arrived at our unit, the original
author of the text wanted nothing to do with it (IIRC could not in fact be
definitely identified; the first draft was a multi-author effort and noone
on the project could recall who had said this in discussion, who had
actually typed it, etc.) By contrast, I thought a visit to the award
ceremony might be fun. (We all thought the pEc were pretty stupid to give
an 'award' to text that was only in the first draft of an internal project
document never intended to be read by anyone beyond, but I rather relished
the challenge of giving a speech that would make that point while not
seeming sour-grapes-ish and I thought I might hear some genuinely comic
gobbledygook during the ceremony, so I volunteered to go and get the award.)
They seemed rather surprised someone turned up; apparently people usually
don't. The only other responder that year was a reporter from the Daily
Telegraph, who pointed out that he was a court reporter (as in law court,
not Her Majesty's court) and the text for which they had given him an award
was a mere wrapping of 'a thin sauce' of his words around the 'dry hard
legal kernels' of court judgements he had to report; it would have vitiated
the point of his reporting if he had rewritten the law lords' words into his
own English. My single-page speech was, I flatter myself, both passably
witty and a demonstration that at least one person connected with the affair
could make words express meaning. (As I recall, I rang the changes on
various object-oriented buzzwords.)
On the whole, I was not too impressed with the pEc (even allowing for the
less than ideal way I encountered them). I daresay they do some good and
less harm than many a pressure group, but they had, and still have, the
unlovable characteristic of many such groups that because 'the cause is
good' pedantic accuracy and relevance is less important. I also had the
impression that despite their '7000 members in 80 countries' they are a
small operation and poor at gathering material, so dependent on whatever
happens to be sent them.
The minimum wage text has more business being noticed by them than a first
draft of an OO project document; those who work for the minimum wage will
include people with poor English skills and if they must be subject to
regulations then these should at least be easy to read. However it were
really the worst gobbledygook written in the last 25 years (which it's not),
we'd have little to complain about. (If you replace 'not-hours work' with
'type-X work' in your mind while reading it, the not-very-interesting
meaning becomes instantly clear.) The example they rated third is the
worst, since ambiguous phrases like 'on account' make it hard to be sure
where clauses start and end in its long sentences, and, to judge by the
amounts mentioned, its likely recipients could not all be expected to parse
complex text.
Recently, in a blatantly PC act, the plain English campaign 'awarded' Donard
Rumsfeldt for expressing (not ineptly) an idea that anyone with two brain
cells to rub together could have understood. Quite a few people justly
pilloried them for that.
Meanwhile, however, we must resign ourselves to the fact that ideas that are
easy for Smalltalkers are still too advanced for the masses - all 7000 of
them in their 80 countries. :-) We must win by killer apps, not by debate.
Yours faithfully
Niall Ross
"alexis rzewski" <arzewski@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:d209f52d.0407271217.21d0b045@posting.google.com...
> Jargon-busters pick top offenders after 25 years of rewriting history
> John Ezard, arts correspondent
> Monday July 26, 2004
> The Guardian
> The Plain English Campaign today celebrates the anniversary of a
> mission as vital, unglamorous and unending as sewage disposal. For a
> quarter of a century, it has been struggling to cleanse the muck of
> jargon and circumlocution from British official writing.
> The campaign was co-founded with the vehemence of a crue by
> Chrissie Maher, a Liverpool woman furious because the official forms
> she received were indecipherable. Its combined tactic of public
> ridicule and backstairs training for repentant organisations can claim
> credit for the clearer forms and leaflets now seen in many health
> clinics, post offices and government ministries.
> Yesterday its 7,000 supporters in 80 countries marked the anniversary
> by nominating their choicest item of gobbledygook from the last 25
> years.
> The winner is a sentence from draft national minimum wage regulations
> introduced by Tony Blair's government in 1998.
> John Lister, campaign spokesman said: "It shows that even everyday
> words of one or two syllables can cause confusion when they are poorly
> chosen."
> The campaign pays its costs by working as a consultant for
> organisations eager to improve communication with the public. Its
> success in this job has inspired several rivals. Yesterday one of
> these, Emphasis Training, conceded that the Plain English Campaign's
> high-profile crue had simplified the way businesses wrote to
> consumers. "Unfortunately, the same isn't true of business documents,"
> said Rob Ashton, an Emphasis director. "UK businesses waste billions
> every year paying people to write documents that their colleagues
> struggle to - or never - read".
> Mr Ashton added that an Emphasis survey of 150 companies found they
> felt an average of 17% of the documents they received were badly
> written, with emails the worst.
> Sixty-four per cent of companies cited emails, with end-of-year
> reports, letters, web texts and technical language as the next worst
> offenders.
> Faults regarded as most vexing were bad punctuation (34%), bad
> spelling (31%), jargon (10%), "generally hard to understand" (16%) and
> misuse of words (8%). Unexplained acronyms and unclear technical terms
> also caused anger. Emphasis has issued a dictionary of the 131 most
> misused terms.
> Mr Ashton cited a recent company document inviting tenders.
> "Description/objective of the contract: to provide evidence on the
> extent to which north-west organisation's needs for enhanced and
> modified skills and knowledge among their existing adult employees are
> being met."
> The author of the tender document should have written, according to Mr
> Ashton: "We want to discover how much employees of companies in the
> north-west have improved their skills and knowledge".
> An equally bad example was a Department of Health guidance document:
> "The aim of this resource pack is to help organisations promote and
> implement the use of an HR Leadership Qualities Framework that
> describes those behaviours which enhance NHS HR capacity and
> capability to improve the patient experience".
> This should have read, according to Mr Ashton: "This resource pack
> will help NHS organisations promote and introduce a Human Resources
> Leadership Qualities Framework. The framework will assist NHS HR
> departments in improving the patient experience".
> He said: "Concise writing means calling a spade a spade, not a manual
> earth-moving implement."
> The winners
>
> 1st
> 1989 National minimum wage regulations
> The hours of non-hours work worked by a worker in a pay reference
> period shall be the total of the number of hours spent by him during
> the pay reference period in carrying out the duties required of him
> under his contract to do non-hours work
>
> 2nd
> 1989 STC Technology Ltd document
> There is an unavoidable conflict of terminology in naming the classes
> Class and Instantation. Instantation is not itself a real instance but
> a class (namely, the class of all real instances). Likewise, Class is
> not a class of real instances but a class of classes (namely, the
> class of all classes of real instances). Instantation could be renamed
> Class and Class renamed Type to avoid this. In that case, the members
> of Class would not be classes and the members of Type would not be
> types.
>
> 3rd
> 1982 letter from the Department of Health and Social Security
> From and including 26.2.81 an additional component is payable at the
> wly rate of 5p which is the rate appropriate to 11/4% of the amount
> of the surpluses in the earnings factors for 3 years in the claimant's
> working life after reduction on account of his guaranteed minimum
> pension of £2.04 (the guaranteed minimum pension was originally
> notified to the claimant as £1.99 and has subsequently been amended to
> £2.04) (Social Security Pensions Act 1975 Section 6 and 29 (1) and the
> Social Security (Earnings Factor) Regulations reg 2 and the Schedule)
> and graduated retirement benefit at the wly rate of £2.37 (£2.58
> from 26.2.81) which is the amount appropriate to 67 units of graduated
> contributions paid or treated as paid by the claimant (National
> Insurance Act 1965 Section 36 and the Social Security (Graduated
> Retirement Benefit) (No.2) Regulations reg 3 (3) and Schedule 1)
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