Gobbledygook

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The House passes Bill H.R. 3548 , The Plain Language in Government Communications Act of 2008. The New Republic has an amusing anecdote about Jeff Flake (R-AZ), the lone dissenter in the House.

Here’s what sponsor Bruce Braley (D-IA) has to say about the Bill:

Anyone who has done their own taxes knows the headache of trying to understand pages and pages of confusing forms and instructions. There is no reason why the Federal Government can’t write tax documents and other public documents in language we can all understand.

Writing government documents in plain language will increase government accountability and will save Americans time and money. Plain, straightforward language makes it easy for taxpayers to understand what the Federal Government is doing and what services it’s offering.

Small businesses will also see substantial benefits by eliminating Federal gobbledygook. Small businesses often have limited resources and are forced to hire lawyers and outside consultants to navigate the maze of Federal paperwork and convoluted language.

[...]

The Plain Language in Government Communications Act will require the Federal Government to write new publications, forms and publicly distributed documents in a clear, concise, well organized manner that follows the best practices of plain language writing.

I have in my hand the Plain Language Handbook that’s already being used by the Securities Exchange Commission, along with the Federal Plain Language guidelines which were adopted under another plain language initiative that began under President Clinton. These guidelines make it clear that the ultimate purpose of any communication from the Federal Government should be to reach the intended audience, the constituents and citizens of this country, in language they can understand and act upon.

Using complex language in government forms, letters, notices and instructions imposes unnecessary hardships on citizens. Replacing complex language with plain language will improve services to the public, save time agencies spend answering questions about what documents mean, and make it easier to hold government agencies accountable for their work.

Back in the 1930’s, It was in fact another Congressman, Maury Maverick of Texas, who coined the term “gobbledygook” to criticize bureaucratic jargon. Maverick’s efforts to eliminate this jargon came to nothing – and so will Braley’s attempt today.

There are at least two reasons why efforts like this fail. First of all, “simplicity” is not an obvious set of attributes inherent in language, and what counts as simple for the Securities and Exchange Commission manual (available here) may not count as simple in all letters, forms, notices and instructions that pass between citizens and their government. Indeed, the SEC book is so directly tailored to meet the needs of investors that virtually none of its rigid proscriptions are germane to the writing challenges faced by personnel in the IRS, Post Office, HUD, Veteran’s Affairs or any of the other myriad government offices. In other words, simplicity is not as simple as it sounds – its attributes vary depending on the writer, reader and situation.

Secondly, in his effort to make language simpler, Braley doesn’t bother to ask why language got complex in the first place. Take the tax example. It is true that tax instructions are indecipherable. But indecipherable to whom and why? Tax language is complex because taxation is complex. The difficulty arises because people steeped in this complexity need to communicate it to those who are not. It is a situation in which language will necessarily become convoluted because experts tend to use trade terms and shorthands that their readers will not be immediately familiar with.

The same is true for any situation in which a highly professionalized system of understandings encounters a mass audience with little background in that system. Unless we start from this discrepancy, it is unreasonable to expect that we might reduce confusion. A more productive approach might be to begin by identifying the most common miscommunications that arise between particular government organs and the citizens they interact with. This way, we won’t focus on creating naturally “plain” constructions, but will instead concentrate on how to think about simplicity in given situations, thereby building skills rather than just setting rules for how to use conditionals or choose typeface.

The truth is that words aren’t just naturally “plain” or “gobbledygook.” These adjectives describe reactions that are produced by contexts and real people, not by properties within words themselves.

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Filed under Language, Politics

Tags: Bruce Braley, Maury Maverick