The Uphill Battle Against Bureaucratese

Ensor, David

The Uphill Battle against Bureaucratese DAVID ENSOR Have you ever tried to read The Federal Register? It comes out every weekday — a thick and verbose Government publication containing all the...

...But Morris and Joseph say bureaucrats tend to write for the general public as they did for their college professors...
...They began with a fine example of bureaucratese — an excerpt from an HEW regulation: "This matter will be critiqued and augmented through independent and iterative reviews by individuals representing the scholarly, school, and localized community of sufficient range to obtain replicability consensus and breadth of views to form substantial implementation of the final resulting architectural documentation which will record the needs assessment...
...Armed with a copy of The Federal Register, I attended the first classes...
...So HEW Secretary David Mathews is sending his regulation writers back to school...
...There's a young man in my group right now," noted Morris, "who laughed when we said, 'Make it simple.' He said he had just gotten his master's degree in business administration and his dissertation had to be in high academic style...
...People in the Department tell me that while it may be possible to convert the 1,000 or so regulation writers to the idea of writing understandable English, that approach is not admired by the lawyers in the General Counsel's office who review new regulations...
...David Ensor is a reporter in Washington for National Public Radio...
...You've got to tell them never to use a big word if they can say the same thing with a smaller one...
...Recent college graduates are the worst, both men agree...
...The instructors were John 0. Morris and Albert Joseph, whose previous clients have included Government agencies ranging from the Highway Administration to the Central Intelligence Agency...
...Now Mathews wants to cut its output of red tape, but that will not be easy either...
...One of the standard anti-Washington complaints in this election year is that the Government utters nothing but gobbledygook, and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare is a prime offender...
...It would," said Morris, "take me a good five minutes to figure out what that sentence means — and maybe it doesn't really mean anything...
...It's all part of the attitude that 'because Shakespeare was hard for me to understand in school, good writing has to be hard to understand.' " The last Secretary of HEW, Caspar Weinberger, tried — and mostly failed — to cut the Department's spending...
...I suspect," added Joseph, "that it doesn't mean anything more complex than 'We're going to watch this carefully and try to do the best we can.' But, you see, scholars would be ashamed to say it that way...
...Everything is there — from affirmative action hiring procedures to specifications for anti-tank mines...
...You've got to tell people to shorten the sentences," Joseph observed...
...It comes out every weekday — a thick and verbose Government publication containing all the regulations you will ever need to know about how to obey the latest laws Congress has passed...
...Bureaucratese is the word for the official Federal writing style, and an entire industry of specialized newsletters and highly paid analysts has grown up to tell people, in plain English, what their Government wants them to do...
...I suppose the answer is that English teachers have gradually become literature specialists," said Joseph...
...But it is almost impossible to read...
...Once they get the word, student bureaucrats ask why they weren't taught to write this way in school...
...So they rewrite them into bureaucratese...
...And boy, you should hear the resistance we get from educated men and women when we tell them to stop showing off the size of their vocabulary...
...Lawyers, engineers, sea captains — almost every professional group has its own jargon...

Vol. 40 • November 1976 • No. 11


 
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