PARAGRAPHS
Letters, reports, memoranda and other documents would be unreadable if they were not divided into paragraphs, and much has been written on the art of paragraphing. But little of it helps the ordinary writer; the subject does not admit of precise guidance. The chief thing to remember is that, although paragraphing loses all point if the paragraphs are excessively long, the paragraph is essentially a unit of thought, not of length. For the sake of clarity, every paragraph should be homogeneous in subject matter, and sequential in treatment of it. If a single sequence of treatment of a single subject goes on so long as to make an unreasonably long paragraph, it may be divided into more than one. But you should not do the opposite, and combine into a single paragraph passages that have not this unity, even though each by itself may be below the average length of a paragraph.
PARENTHESIS
The purpose of a parenthesis is ordinarily to insert an illustration, explanation, definition, or additional piece of information of any sort, into a sentence that is logically and grammatically complete without it. A parenthesis may be marked off by commas, dashes or brackets. The degree of interruption of the main sentence will vary. Explanatory words that parallel the subject can be almost imperceptible:
Mr Smith, the secretary, read the minutes.
But the interruption may be the violent one of a separate sentence complete in itself:
A memorandum (six copies of this memorandum are enclosed for the information of the board) has been issued to management committees.
Parentheses should be used sparingly. Their very convenience is a reason for fighting shy of them. They enable writers to dodge the trouble of arranging their thoughts properly. But a writer’s thoughts are left badly arranged at the expense of the reader, especially if the thought that has been spatchcocked into the sentence forms an abrupt break in it, or a lengthy one, or both. The second of the two examples just given shows an illegitimate use of the parenthesis. The writer had no business to keep the reader waiting for the verb by throwing in a parenthesis that would have been put better as a separate sentence. The following examples are even worse:
to regard day nurseries and daily guardians as supplements to meet the special needs (where these exist and cannot be met within the hours, age, range and organisation of nursery schools and nursery classes) of children whose mothers are constrained by individual circumstances to go out to work …
If duties are however declined in this way, it will be necessary for the Board to consider whether it should agree to a modified contract in the particular case, or whether—because the required service can be provided only by the acceptance of the rejected obligations (e.g. by a whole-time radiologist to perform radiological examinations of paying patients in Section 5 beds in a hospital where the radiologists are all whole-time officers)—the Board should seek the services of another practitioner …
These are intolerable abuses of the parenthesis, the first with its interposition of twenty-one words in the middle of the phrase ‘needs of children’, and the second with its double parenthesis, more than forty words long, like two snakes eating each other. There was no need for either of these monstrosities. In both examples the main sentence should be allowed to finish without interruption, and what is now in the parenthesis, so far as it is worth saying, should be added at the end:
to regard day nurseries and daily guardians as supplements to meet the special needs of children whose mothers are constrained …and whose needs cannot be met …
or whether the Board should seek the services of another practitioner, as they will have to do if the required service can be provided only …
Here is a parenthesis that keeps the reader waiting so long for the verb that the subject is easily forgotten:
Close affiliation with University research in haematology—and it may be desirable that ultimately each Regional Transfusion Officer should have an honorary appointment in the department of pathology in the medical school—will help to attract into the service medical men of good professional standing.
In former days, when long and involved sentences were fashionable, it was customary after a lengthy parenthesis to put the reader on the road again by repeating the subject with the words ‘I say’. Thus the last example would run:
Close affiliation with University research in haematology—and it may be desirable that ultimately each Regional Transfusion Officer should have an honorary appointment in the department of pathology in the medical school—close affiliation with University research in haematology, I say, will help to attract into the service medical men …
Now that this handy device has fallen into disuse,* there is all the more need not to keep the reader waiting. There was no necessity to do so here. What is said as a parenthesis might just as well have been said as an independent sentence following the main one.
It is not only the reader but also the writer who sometimes forgets where the sentence was when the parenthesis started, as in the letter quoted in Chapter III:
owing to a shortage of a spare pair of wires to the underground cable (a pair of wires leading from the point near your house right back to the local exchange and thus a pair of wires essential for the provision of service for you) is lacking …
The writer imagined that the parenthesis started after the words ‘owing to the fact that a spare pair of wires to the underground cable’, and continued conformably afterwards.
QUESTION MARKS
Only direct questions need question marks. Indirect ones do not. There must be one at the end of ‘Have you completed your tax return?’ but not at the end of ‘I am writing to ask whether you have completed your tax return’.
It is usual to put question marks at the end of requests cast into question form for the sake of politeness. ‘Will you please let me know whether you have completed your tax return?’
SEMICOLON
Do not be afraid of the semicolon; it can be most useful. It marks a longer pause, a more definite break in the sense, than the comma; at the same time it says ‘Here is a clause or sentence too closely related to what has gone before to be cut off by a full stop’.
The semicolon is useful for avoiding the rather dreary trailing participles with which writers often end their sentences:
The postgraduate teaching hospitals are essentially national in their outlook, their geographical situation being merely incidental.
An attempt to devise permanent machinery for consultation was unsuccessful, the initial lukewarm response having soon disappeared.
There is nothing faulty in the grammar or syntax of these sentences, and the meaning of each is unambiguous. But they have a tired look. They can be wonderfully freshened by using the semicolon, and rewriting them:
The postgraduate teaching hospitals are essentially national in their outlook; their geographical situation is merely incidental.
An attempt to devise permanent machinery for consultation was unsuccessful; the initial lukewarm response soon disappeared.
Note. Gowers was a great advocate of the semicolon and used it liberally in his writing. But it is no longer popular, and many writers now do without it altogether. His first sentence above (‘Do not be afraid of the semicolon; it can be most useful’) would by most writers today probably be given in one of the following ways:
Do not be afraid of the semicolon. It can be most useful.
Do not be afraid of the semicolon as it can be most useful.
Do not be afraid of the semicolon: it can be most useful.
If it is really fear that is leading to the semicolon’s neglect, then this is fear at the expense of subtlety. In an address that Gowers gave in 1957, ‘H. W. Fowler: The Man and his Teaching’, he demonstrated a use of semicolons that cannot be bettered by any other style of punctuation. Gowers wished to tell the story of how Fowler lost his job as a schoolmaster. Fowler, who was not a professing Christian, had refused to prepare the boys in his charge for Confirmation, and as a result was overlooked for a
housemastership when a post fell vacant. This is Gowers’s summary of what happened next:
He protested; the headmaster was firm; and Fowler resigned.
Here the semicolons quietly suggest that these episodes in Fowler’s life succeeded one another like toppling dominoes. ~
SENTENCES
A sentence is not easy to define. Many learned grammarians have tried, and their definitions have been torn to pieces by other learned grammarians. But what most of us understand by a sentence is what the OED calls the ‘popular’ definition: ‘such a portion of a composition or utterance as extends from one full stop to another’. That definition is good enough for our present purposes, so the question we have to consider is the general guidance that can be given about what to put between one full stop and the next.
The two main things to be remembered about sentences if you want to make your meaning plain is that they should be short and should have unity of thought. Here is a series of eighty-six words between one full stop and another that violates all the canons of a good sentence. In fact this example might be said to explode the definition, for it would be flattering to call it a ‘sentence’. A friend who was good enough to look through this book in proof called it instead ‘gibberish’.
Forms are only sent to applicants whose requirements exceed one ton, and in future, as from tomorrow, forms will only be sent to firms whose requirements exceed five tons, and as you have not indicated what your requirements are, I am not sending you forms at the moment because it is just possible that your requirements may be well within these quantities quoted, in which case you may apply direct to the usual suppliers, of which there are several, with a view to obtaining your requirements.
If we prune this of its verbiage, and split it into three short sentences, a meaning will begin to emerge:
Only firms whose requirements exceed five tons now need forms. Others can apply direct to the suppliers. As you do not say what your requirements are I will not send you a form unless I hear that you need one.
The following is an even worse example of a meandering stream of words masquerading as a sentence:
Further to your letter of the above date and reference in connection with an allocation of …, as already pointed out to you all the allocations for this period have been closed, and I therefore regret that it is not possible to add to the existing allocation which has been made to you and which covers in toto your requirements for this period when originally received, by virtue of the work on which you are engaged, a rather higher percentage has been given to you, namely 100 per cent of the original requirements and at this stage I am afraid it is not practicable for you to increase the requirement for the reasons already given.
The fault here is more one of excessive verbiage than of combining into a single sentence what ought to have been given in several. Indeed the thought is simple. It can be conveyed simply thus:
Your original application was granted in full because of the importance of your work. I regret that the amount cannot now be increased, as allocation for this period has been closed.
XI
Epilogue
He that wyll wryte well in any tongue, muste folowe thys councel of Aristotle, to speake as the comon people do, to thinke as wise men do : and so shoulde euery man vnderstande hym, and the iudgement of wyse men alowe hym.
ROGER ASCHAM, Toxophilus, 1545
A book designed as a guide to officials in the use of English runs the risk of giving a false impression. It cannot help being concerned mainly with faults to be corrected, and so may make the picture look blacker than it is. The true justification for such a book is not so much that official English is especially bad, as that it is especially important for it to be good. The efficiency of government, central and local, depends to an ever-increasing extent on the ability of a large number of officials to express themselves clearly. At present there is a popular idea that most of them cannot—or will not—do so. The term officialese has been invented for what is supposed to be their ineffective way of trying.
I do not know exactly what the word means, and for once the Oxford English Dictionary is not illuminating. It defines officialese unhelpfully as ‘the language characteristic of officials or official documents’.* Even with the illustrations the OED cites we are left in some doubt about the true characteristics of this language. But that officialese is not ordinarily used as a term of praise is certain.
I should be sorry to be thought to support the popular notion that officials write a language of their own of a uniquely deplorable kind. Undoubtedly they have their peculiar faults of style. So have journalists theirs. It is reasonable to attribute those of officials in the main to the peculiar difficulties with which they have to contend. Much of their energy has to be devoted to the task of translating the language of the law into terms that are simple and yet free from ambiguity, a Herculean undertaking when the original has been made obscure precisely in order that it should be unambiguous. Moreover our system of government imposes on officials the need always of being cautious and often of avoiding a precision of statement that might be politically dangerous. And officials do not easily shake off the idea that dignity of position demands dignity of diction. But it is certainly wrong to imagine that official writing, as an instrument for conveying thought, is generally inferior to the lamentably low standard now prevalent except among professional writers. It is not only officials who yield to the lure of the pompous or meretricious word, and overwork it; it is not they alone who sometimes fail to think clearly what meaning they want to convey by what they are about to write, or to revise and prune what they have written so as to make sure that they have conveyed it. From some common faults the official is comparatively free. Most write grammatically correct English. Their style is untainted by the silly jargon of commercialese, the catchpenny tricks of the worst sort of journalism, the more nebulous nebulosities of politicians, or the recondite abstractions of Greek or Latin origin in which men of science, philosophers and economists often wrap up their thoughts.* Sometimes their writing is very good, but then no one notices it. Occasionally it is excellent.
The fact is not that officials do uniquely badly, but that they are uniquely vulnerable. Making fun of them has always been one of the diversions of the British public. The fun sometimes has a touch of malice in it, but the habit springs from qualities in the British character that no one would like to see atrophied. The field for its exercise and the temptation to indulge in it are constantly growing. De facto executive power, which during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries moved from monarchs to ministers, is being diffused lower still by the growth of social legislation. Tennyson’s ‘fierce light which beats upon a throne, And blackens every blot’ is no longer focused on the apex, but shines on the whole pyramid. So many people have to read so many official instructions. These offer a bigger target for possible criticism than any other class of writing except journalism, and are more likely to get it than any other class, because our critical faculties as readers are sharpened by being told—as we all so often have to be nowadays—that we cannot do something we want to, or must do something we do not want to, or that we can only do something we want to by going through a lot of tiresome formalities.
So it is natural enough that official writing, undeniably inclined towards certain idiosyncrasies of style, should have been worked up into a stock joke. The professional humorist, in print or on the stage or on the air, by quoting or inventing bits of it can always be sure of a laugh. It is a way of getting one’s own back, and is pleasantly flattering to the critics’ sense of superiority. Walter Bagehot once pictured the public of his day as saying to themselves with unction:
Thank God, I am not as that man; I did not send green coffee to the Crimea; I did not send patent cartridge to the common guns, and common cartridge to the breech loaders. I make money; that miserable public functionary only wastes money. (The English Constitution, 1867)
So may we imagine the critic of today saying:
‘Thank God, I am not as the official; when I write I make my meaning plain; those miserable public functionaries only obscure theirs, if indeed they ever had any’. The critic may even be right—about the miserable functionary.
Though the spirit that still moves us to mock our officials may be healthy, the amusement can be overdone. One or two recent critics of so-called ‘officialese’ have indulged in it to excess, deriding without discrimination, putting in their pillory good as well as bad, sometimes even mistaking the inventions of other scoffers for monstrosities actually committed. That is regrettable. It is a curious fact that attempts to teach ‘good English’ often meet with resistance. Probably the explanation is that an exaggerated importance was for a long time given to things that do not greatly matter. The conviction still lingers that instruction in good English means having to learn highbrow rules of no practical usefulness. It will be no easy task to put the truth across that ‘good English’ consists less in observing grammatical pedantries than in a capacity to express oneself simply and neatly. Unfair criticism arouses reasonable resentment, and increases the difficulty of creating an atmosphere receptive of the new ideas. Even the notion that officialese in its derogatory sense is encouraged by authority has not wholly disappeared. The truth is, on the contrary, that great pains are now taken to train staffs to write clear and straightforward English. This may not always show in the results, but that is another thing.
Plain Words Page 26
