Plain English

I enjoyed reading “Bureaucrats” by Roger Shuy at Language Log. I have had to inject myself into enough battles with bureaucracy on behalf of my in-laws that I have come to loathe the arcane gibberish in which most formal notices from insurance companies, the government, and other entities are commonly worded.

Shuy, a retired linguist, was once hired by the US Social Security Administration to train bureaucrats to write notices that the recipients could actually read and understand (what a concept!). Seems the SSA was forced to do something because they had been threatened with a lawsuit:

One of my favorite cases was one brought by the National Senior Citizens Law Center (NSCLC) against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) over two decades ago. NSCLC charged that the notices being sent out by SSA to Medicare recipients were unclear, unhelpful, and not even readable. The case focused on one notice that was intended to inform all SSA recipients that they also might be entitled to an additional SSA benefit, Suplementary Security Income (SSI). The case wended its way through the court system and finally ended up at the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled for the plaintiff. Legal resolutions don’t often guarantee immediate action, however, and it took quite a while for SSA to get around to sending out this notice to all Social Security recipients. That notice was so badly written and incomprensible that NSCLC threatened HHS with still another lawsuit.

It was at that point that NSCLC asked me to rewrite the offending notice so that it could be understood by recipients. They liked my revision (which was actually a totally new attempt) and they submitted it to SSA, where the director liked enough to agree to send it out, thereby fending off still another round in federal court.

Shuy was subsequently brought in to train SSA notice writers. He even assigned them to find elderly people on which to “test” their writing as fieldwork. Apparently the training program was a great success, and Shuy reports that the notices he now receives from SSA are still clear and lucid. (Anyone out there wanting to confirm or rebut that?). Near the end of the post, Shuy writes,

These bureaucrats were good people and good bureaucrats. But they had been caught up in the contagious rigidity of the bureaucratic prose fostered by the system. Like most of us who learn to use the language of our fields (doctors and policemen come to mind), they had no background in writing clear and effective prose and, of course, no knowledge of  linguistics. But even the small dose they got in this training program seems to have brought about an important change in that bureaucracy.

I would hasten to add “biblical scholars” to doctors and police officers as those who have learned the language of their field but, sadly, do not always rise to the level of producing clear and effective prose. I freely admit that I’m sometimes guilty of forgetting who is in my audience on this blog (Connie usually just skips the posts where I try to get all exegetical), but at least I try. When you think of the amount of writing that is actually required of someone in order to receive a Ph.D, it’s a shame that so many of us can’t quite get through a paragraph without a few juxtapositions, ramifications, or even a tertium quid or two.

Obviously, there are some great writers out there in the biblical studies field (N. T. Wright and Bart Ehrman spring immediately to mind), but there are also some who need refresher courses in how to write plain English for a non-scholarly audience.

Related:

• Writing Bible Study Curriculum