Читать книгу Collins Improve Your Writing Skills - Graham King - Страница 11

A person shall be treated as suffering from physical disablement such that he is either unable to walk or virtually unable to do so if he is not unable or virtually unable to walk with a prosthesis or an artificial aid which he habitually wears or uses or if he would not be unable or virtually unable to walk if he habitually wore or used a prosthesis or an artificial aid which is suitable in his case.

This would-be ‘sentence’ first of all reflects the legalistic terror of official punctuation: the full stop or comma which, if misplaced, might lead the Department all the way to a House of Lords appeal. And, second, it ignores or offends half the population – women – by exclusively using the masculine pronouns he and his.

So let us take our machete to the undergrowth, bring in the mine detectors and wire-cutters, and try to discover what, if anything, this passage struggles to convey. A step at a time, too, for fear of booby traps.

A person shall be treated as suffering from physical disablement . . . treated?

This is not intended as medical advice, but since the context is medical the reader may, however briefly, be confused. Lift out treated and replace with considered. Throw treated into the shrubbery.

Suffering from physical disablement. Why not simply physically disabled? And while we are at it, we don’t need as after considered. Toss that into the shrubbery too.

So far, in our cleaned-up version, we have ‘A person shall be considered physically disabled’ – and we don’t seem to have lost any of the intended meaning.

Such that he is either unable to walk or virtually unable to do so. Wrench away the clumsy such that he is and replace it with which makes him (we’ll come to the offending pronouns later). Next, we cut out either, because we don’t need it.

We now have which makes him unable to walk, or virtually unable to do so. This can be more tightly expressed as which makes him, unable, or virtually unable, to walk.

Peering into the darkening thicket we next tackle if he is not unable or virtually unable to walk with a prosthesis or an artificial aid which he habitually wears or uses . . . Stop! The rest is just the gibbering of jungle monkeys. This seems to mean that the person can get around, but only with the help of a prosthesis or other artificial aid. The word even, before if he is not, would have helped. But we really do not need this tangled heap of words at all.

The entire ‘sentence’, if it means anything, must surely mean this:

A person is regarded as physically disabled if he or she always needs an artificial aid to walk.

We can of course replace the masculine and feminine pronouns with that person:

A person is regarded as physically disabled if that person always needs an artificial aid to walk.

As you can see, the meaning remains clear. But what about the prosthesis, you may ask. Well, there are thousands of people with prostheses in the form of replacement hips and knees and other artificial body parts who are bounding about without the least need of any artificial aids – wheelchairs, zimmers and walking sticks – so the amended versions are perfectly valid.

The Case of the Crippled Sentence is a prime example of the need to think ‘What do I want to say?’ And then to say it, the simple way.