Читать книгу Collins Improve Your Writing Skills - Graham King - Страница 9

The self-appointed guardian angel of our national tongue is Chrissie Maher, OBE, founder of the Plain English Campaign. Remarkably, Ms Maher, who was brought up by a widowed mother in a poor household in wartime Liverpool, did not learn to read or write until she was in her teens. The disability dogged her until, during a job interview with an insurance company, she admitted she was illiterate. Instead of rejection she was told she could have the job, provided she studied at night school; three years later she could read, write and count. In her adult life she went on to a degree course in sociology.

A deprived background made Chrissie Maher keenly aware of how uneducated people were fobbed off by officialese they couldn’t understand, and how they were often coerced into signing important documents and forms, with little idea about what the small print meant. When she came across a case in which an old lady died of hypothermia because she couldn’t understand the application form for a home heating grant, she decided to do something about it.

Maher launched the Plain English Campaign in 1979: since then, with its relentless exposure of bureaucratic pomp and absurdity, it has become both feared and admired. It prompted a government review which resulted in some 36,000 official forms being scrapped and another 60,000 rewritten to make them more easily understood. It is frequently hired by organisations to vet their forms and sales literature and issues a ‘Crystal Mark’ to commercial prose which passes its standards of clarity. To transgressors of simple English however, it issues its annual Golden Bull awards. Winners of this trophy – appropriately a pound of tripe – include the Department of Agriculture which defined cows, pigs and sheep as ‘grain-consuming animal units’, a car sales firm which described a used car as a ‘pre-enjoyed vehicle’, and the National Health Service for defining a bed as:

A device or arrangement that may be used to permit a patient to lie down when the need to do so is a consequence of the patient’s condition rather than a need for active intervention such as examination, diagnostic intervention, manipulative treatment, obstetric delivery or transport.

The more recent Plain Language Commission has identical objectives and issues its own annual awards – the Golden and Silver Rhubarb trophies for the year’s most baffling documents.

Both organisations waged a war of blunt words in 1995 when the Commission awarded NatWest Bank a silver trophy for what it called an example of the year’s worst gobbledegook in a booklet about mortgage rates, part of which read:

Depending upon the type of mortgage you have, repaying early can have certain financial consequencies [sic], for instance, early repayment of a mortgage and surrender of an endowment policy, may leave you with a small surrendering sum, which may not reflect the actual monies invested. Alternatively, cancellation of a life policy without considering future needs may ultimately mean increased premiums for the same amount of life cover in the future.

To the embarrassment of the Plain English Campaign, NatWest Bank had just been nominated for its ‘Crystal Clear Bank of Europe’ award for the ‘ease with which its literature could be understood’!

You may wonder, when the experts in concise, coherent communication disagree so profoundly, whether you will ever see the clear light of day through the other side of the jungle. But take heart and read on and you will learn how even the most dense thicket of verbiage can be trimmed and tamed.