Bay Of Plenty Beacon Published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. FRIDAY, JANUARY 13, 1950 SIMPLER ENGLISH

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 14, Issue 85, 13 January 1950, Page 4

Bay Of Plenty Beacon Published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. FRIDAY, JANUARY 13, 1950

SIMPLER ENGLISH

Civil servants in some of the bigger Government departments have been at school in their spare time learning how to simplify the language of official forms and correspondence, it was reported on Wednesday. Included in the course are the arts of precis writing and correct punctuation. Here is a welcome attempt to do something that has needed doing for a long time. It is to be hoped that the idea spreads to the business world, and ultimately to the schools. For it has to be admitted that the proper use of plain English, is not a common accomplishment of the graduates of our present-day education. There is a tendency to ignore punctuation altogether, and very few seem to be able to express ideas clearly and concisely. Most of us will be delighted that there is at last some effort being made to clean up the jargon that has characterised official forms and correspondence for so long. We hope the idea spreads throughout the business world as well. Too long have we put up with those meaningless phrases like “I have the honour to be, Sir, your most obedient servant.” Apart from its nauseatingly obsequious tone and obvious insincerity, such stereotyped jargon wastes a lot of time and paper while doing nothing to add to the sense of the communications it so often concludes. Of recent years there has been an effort to clean up “business English”, and most of the more go-ahead organisations now try to persuade the people who handle their correspondence to say what they mean as clearly and briefly as possible without any pointless trimmings. Many

have even become honest enough to wash out the “Dear” in addressing people with whom they are doing business but for whom they have no real affection. The moderns have the right idea when they merely headline a letter “Referring to your communication of January 1” then get on with what they have to say. So much better than “We are in receipt of your esteemed favour of the first instant, and with refernce thereto hereby beg to state” and so on, ad lib. Perhaps the most confusing trend in contemporary English (at any rate so far as the communcations we receive are concerned) is the tendency to drop punctuation altogether. Sentences are often strung together three or four in a row with no indication as to where one ends and the next begins. When the ideas they are intended to express are all woolly around the edges and the writer’s vocabulary poor, the lack of punctuation is quite the last straw in making the sense of the whole thing difficult to discover. Yet the writers of such communications are often quite indignant when they are misunderstood. Whoever is responsible for this move in the civil service deserves the congratulations and indeed the gratitude of the whole community.