Language Matters Activity 2
Sample Response: Getting to the Point
1.
The rules and guidelines
As Orwell himself acknowledged, his rules are not a failsafe route to good prose. The last of the
six – ‘Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous’ – lays bare their
fundamental limitation as rules: they are not categorical. Underlying all the instructions is the
idea that writers need to have a sound sense of what a situation calls for. If they have no feeling
for where short words ‘will do’ or what is ‘barbarous’, they will not be able to apply the rules to
good effect.
Orwell saw them as rules of last resort for an already competent writer to draw upon in difficult
situations. They cannot resolve basic problems in spelling, grammar, punctuation and word
choice. Consider this extract from the first text on multiculturalism:
“Such ideologies or policies vary widely, including country to country, ranging from the
advocacy of equal respect to the various cultures in a society, to a policy of promoting
the maintenance of cultural diversity, to policies in which people of various ethnic and
religious groups are addressed by the authorities as defined by the group they belong
to.”
It is hard work to read this sentence. Part of the problem is simply its length, of course. However,
the writers inadvertently create additional work for the reader by using a word in an odd way.
Although there are circumstances in which the noun ‘respect’ can be followed by the preposition
‘to’ (e.g., in the expression ‘with respect to’), when ‘respect’ is used in the sense of ‘esteem,
honour’, it is normally followed by ‘for’: ‘to show respect for one’s parents’. In this particular
context, the use of ‘to’ rather than ‘for’ has the potential to cause confusion. The expression
‘ranging from’ leads readers to expect that ‘to’ will soon follow: ‘ranging from X to Y’. However,
the first ‘to’ that they subsequently come across actually goes with ‘respect’, not with ‘ranging
from’. Readers might have to pause for a moment to work out which words go together, a
problem which would not have arisen if the more usual ‘respect for’ had been used instead.
Orwell’s rules would not resolve problems of this kind.
Whatever their limitations, they are useful, though. If the authors of the article on multiculturalism
had attempted to apply them, they might have produced a more readable text. Look at this
extract:
“The term is used in two broad ways, either descriptively or normatively. As a descriptive
term, it usually refers to the simple fact of cultural diversity: it is generally applied to the
demographic make-up of a specific place, sometime at the organisational level, e.g.
schools, businesses, neighbourhoods, cities, or nations. As a normative term, it refers to
ideologies or policies that promote this diversity or its institutionalisation”
The third of Orwell’s rules, which warns against wordiness, is relevant here: lots of words could
be cut out of this passage without changing its meaning. Why ‘the simple fact’ rather than just
‘the fact’, or ‘a specific place’ rather than just ‘a place’? Why ‘generally applied’ when no
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exceptions are mentioned? The second rule could also be helpful. It is not obvious what the
‘institutionalisation [of diversity]’ involves. Had the writers been on their guard against long words
(or indeed against the abstract vocabulary discussed in the Wikipedia essay on plain English),
they might have rephrased their text so as to avoid ‘institutionalisation’ and, in the process, given
their readers a precise understanding of what they had in mind. In essence, the meaning of this
passage seems to be:
The term is used in two ways: it can refer to places and organisations which exhibit
cultural diversity, or it can refer to ideologies and policies which promote it.
Abstract vocabulary is also a problem in this extract:
“However, two main different and seemingly inconsistent strategies have developed
through different government policies and strategies. The first focuses on interaction and
communication between different cultures. Interactions of cultures provide opportunities
for the cultural differences to communicate and interact to create multiculturalism..”
Cultural differences do not communicate and interact with one another; people do. This rewritten
version avoids that puzzling wording:
Governments have developed two types of strategies for creating multicultural societies.
The first type provides opportunities for people of different cultures to interact with one
another.
Editors reviewing the text with Orwell’s fourth rule in mind would pause when the authors refer to
‘policies in which people of various ethnic and religious groups are addressed by the authorities
as defined by the group they belong to’ (see the first quotation above for the fuller context). As
they tried to decide whether there was a case for using the passive (‘are addressed by’) here,
they would realise that it is far from clear what ‘the authorities’ are supposedly doing. In what
context are they addressing people of various ethnic and religious groups? Who is doing the
defining mentioned in the text? This lack of clarity is not the direct result of using the passive.
Rather, the use of the passive when the active ought to be possible is a symptom of a more
serious underlying problem: the writers do not appear to have understood their sources well
enough to be able to write about them adequately. In the original text, there is a link to a
newspaper article which mentions that public authorities often gather data about people’s
religious and ethnic affiliations in order to help them provide suitable services and support for
different groups in society, but that point gets lost in the Wikipedia writers’ paraphrase.
The Simple English article on multiculturalism is much easier to read: the sentences are short
and the vocabulary is straightforward. Even here, though, there are problems. Seeking to make
the language as easy as possible for their readers, the authors include a parenthetical
explanation of what the word ‘official’ means. However, they place the brackets in an awkward
position, where they interrupt the flow of the sentence. And in the last sentence they fall back on
abstract nouns which again obscure rather than elucidate the meaning. What does it mean to
‘exist by tolerance and by combat against xenophobia’? The rewritten examples in the
paragraphs above have been considerably shorter than the original text, but in this instance a
longer version would be better: ‘But such a society can exist only if its members are tolerant of
one another and reject xenophobia’. The subordinate clause makes the sentence easier, if a
little longer, to read.
To sum up, Orwell’s rules and the guidelines discussed in the Wikipedia essay serve a useful
purpose. They can help authors identify – and avoid – common problems in writing and can thus
help them to express their ideas in a readable way. There are some fundamental things the
rules cannot do, however. They cannot improve grammar, vocabulary and punctuation; they
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cannot give writers a feeling for circumstances in which they should be broken; and they cannot
add sense to texts which lack it. Short words and pithy sentences cannot compensate for
incoherent thoughts.
2.
Plain English
The main Wikipedia article about multiculturalism departs from the recommendations regarding
the use of plain English in several respects. However, whatever the problems with it, it does at
least attempt to give a fuller and more nuanced account of the concept than its Simple English
counterpart. That text is unduly simplistic: it barely mentions connections between
multiculturalism and public policy, for instance. As the rewritten examples in Section 1 show, it is
not necessary to omit entire aspects of a multi-faceted topic in order to write about it
straightforwardly. Writing in plain English is not the same as keeping ideas simple.
At first sight, the main entry on entropy appears to depart a long way from the recommendations
as well. It contains many long, abstract words and a lot of scientific terminology. Non-specialists
will probably find it very difficult to understand. However, it is instructive to compare it to the
corresponding entry in the Simple English Wikipedia. The first text may be very, very hard to
understand, but the introductory paragraph of the Simple English text is downright confusing:
according to the opening sentence, entropy is ‘a law of nature’, but, according to the second and
third sentences, it is a measure. The non-specialist is left wondering how to reconcile these two
apparently different positions. This example underlines the point made at the end of the previous
section: simple words do not automatically generate meaningful texts.
To be sure, there are some obvious ways in which the language of the main article on entropy
could be improved. Orwell might have considered the wording ‘The role […] can be understood
by understanding how […]’ barbarous, for instance. But the fundamental obstacle to grasping
the meaning of the text is its demanding subject matter. Determined general readers can follow
it well enough to be able to identify gaps in their knowledge which prevents them from
understanding what entropy is (e.g., what properties make up the ‘thermodynamic specification’
of a system, and what are the additional properties that must be determined in order to specify
its ‘exact physical state’?). The dense use of scientific terms without explanations and examples
would not be appropriate in a school physics textbook or a newspaper article on popular
science, of course, and there is a case for saying that an article on a website with a readership
as broad as Wikipedia’s should be more accessible. Nevertheless, at least some of the site’s
users will have the background knowledge required to get to grips with it as it stands. As the
contrasting version in Simple English shows, following Orwell’s fifth rule and replacing scientific
terminology with everyday English does not automatically make a difficult concept
comprehensible.
Using plain English does not involve making things simple; it involves making things clear.
© Villiers Park Educational Trust 2013
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