It Is Written

Book and Teaching Material Reviews
Edited by Bern Mulvey

The Plain English Guide: How to Write Clearly and Communicate Better. Martin Cutts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. 165. ISBN 0-19-860049-6.

Reviewed by Charles Jannuzi

There is a popular-- usually journalistic-- type of writing in which the author analyzes issues of grammar, usage, and etymology and then acts like a judge on the language. Often the "expert" does not prescribe from any special authority other than being a persuasive writer with a wide audience. We in the language and literacy education fields must be wary of narrow prescriptive approaches to language. No sooner do we tell a student that there is a certain way to say or write something--evoking a rule or "native speaker intuition" --than corpus analysis (that is, an account of what many other native speakers say or write) contradicts us.

Sometimes narrowly prescriptive approaches to English (almost always of the standard and even literary sort) are justified by the idea that they preserve or restore the "logic" and "clarity of expression" of the mother tongue. In actual fact, logic is, more than anything, a slippery rhetorical term (how can anyone dare argue with "logic" once it is invoked?). Moreover, native languages go where the younger members of the speech communities take them. Teachers may ban a double negative construction like, "I don't got none", because, "logically", two negatives make a positive statement. But here, scholastic logic and real-world clarity part, as deep down, children know it is a prohibition on a very effective, emphatic way of saying, "I don't have any."

Cutts' Plain English Guide is prescriptive, but with the overall purpose of helping writers and their readers to communicate. First, he emphasizes that his book sets down guidelines, not rules. For example, he suggests that writers aim for sentences that average 15-20 words. That does not mean sentences can not be shorter or longer. Second, his guidelines are not arbitrary nor isolated from real communicative purpose. In the case of writing sets of instructions, he suggests testing them with typical users to see if the intended audience can follow them. Moreover, in his own research, business and legal documents rewritten using the guidelines for plain English have consistently done better with focus groups than the originals.

Plain English, interestingly enough, Cutts informs us, has its roots in language in education. He writes,

In England in the 1920s, CK Ogden and IA Richards devised Basic English. Its core was a vocabulary of 850 words which... could, they believed, say everything that needed to be said. Their three aims were that Basic should be an international language, an introduction to full standard English for foreigners, and a kind of plain language for use in science, commerce and government. (pp. 5-6)

Perhaps because Basic English--along with other linguistically based innovations like the Initial Teaching Alphabet (ITA)--did not fit with native intuitions and views of the language, it never has received full acceptance and legitimacy. Still, the idea of it can still be seen in the many attempts to "grade down" the difficulty of texts used to teach students of beginning literacy and ESL/EFL learners. Most mainstream approaches to TEFL still control the structure and vocabulary presented in the syllabuses. In Japan, Ogden and Richard's 850-word set has been revived by Mini- World Magazine, a publication intended as topical, realistic reading and study material for EFL learners.

Politicians who used populist appeal to achieve their ends--such as Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill--embraced the idea of plainer, more accessible English in public discourse. George Orwell's body of work still stands as a formidable weapon in the fight against cant and obscurantism (that is, language used in bad faith in attempts to control thinking and shared representations of reality). From the 1970s on there has been a steady campaign to bring plain English to politics, business, law--or to any type of discourse where the public must deal with elitist professions and institutions. It could be noted that this coincides with a loss of faith in the special knowledge claims of technocrats and professionals. Baby boomers will remember the failed wars on cancer, Vietnam, and poverty as failures of science, technology, and modern management. Perhaps much specialist knowledge appears as nothing more than needlessly difficult language only disguised as knowledge. And, have not too many professionals used their language to obscure the truth while keeping their activities closed to outside analysis?

Cutts tells how plain language movements have enjoyed some political, educational, and commercial success in the English-speaking world and in the countries of the European Union. His plan, though, is not to impose his own views of how language should be used because he is a language conservative. Rather, for most of this book he establishes and explains the guidelines for plain English, showing in example after example just how to use it in real prose. The guidelines are broken up into six areas of concern: style and grammar, preparing and planning, organizing the information, management of writing, plain English for specific purposes, and layout.

In the most extensive area of concern, style and grammar, the most obvious and useful piece of advice is for writers to make their sentences shorter. Length that works against comprehension is always a danger in writing. It is easy as a writer to overuse the recursive and mnemonic nature of the mode and say too much. Cutts recommends an average sentence length of 15 to 20 words and a variety of sentence types to make prose readable but interesting. One method he explains is just to use more full stops and begin shorter sentences with the connecting words, like 'however', 'but', 'so' and even 'and'. Other ways to achieve shorter but effective sentences include the following:

get rid of unnecessary repetition;

use lists of shorter phrases and clauses instead of traditional sentences and paragraphs;

and do not clutter the main ideas of a passage with unnecessary language.

Along with unnecessary wordiness, unnecessarily long words mark difficult English. While it is easy to justify uncommon words when they do convey a special meaning or nuance, often long words just "over-dress simple ideas." True, an impressive and varied vocabulary can make your writing interesting to read, but what if readers can not understand what you write? Cutts gives a long list of words and phrases that make up the word choice of "officialese" and offers plain English alternatives. For example, the next time you find yourself using a word like "endeavour," why not choose "try" or "attempt" instead. If your school "institutes" a new program, why not just say "begin" or "start"?

Within the area of grammar and style, there are many other obstacles to achieving plain English. Notably, Cutts does not rule out the use of the passive voice, but wants us to avoid it unless it is necessary for the proper topic reference or emphasis (and he shows when it is unavoidable). Academic writers often use the passive voice, though, because they feel that is sounds more objective. Another over-used device--and one that works with the passive voice to create academic style--is the substitution of nominalizations for action verbs. Or, in plain English, we use too many abstract noun and noun phrases when we could get to the point with active verbs in shorter, clearer sentences.

Many language pundits are against non-sexist language. Not Cutts. He shows that, with proper planning, non-sexist language is not awkward and points out that

Though sexist usage is not strictly a matter of clarity, any writing habit that builds a barrier between you and half your readers must reduce the impact of your message. So even if you disagree with the view that sexist writing reinforces prejudice and discrimination, it is still wiser to use inclusive language....inclusive writing usually makes more sense and is more accurate. (p. 71)

If you write or edit for publication, the chapters "Using reader-centred structure", "Management of colleagues' writing", and "Basics of clear layout" should prove especially useful. Writers and editors today are lucky because they live in an era of word processing and desktop publishing. But media-savvy readers expect language in print to be well laid-out and easy to navigate. Are modern reading habits evolving toward a "hypertextual" approach? Language with the best of messages can fail if it is not packaged for modern sensibilities. Cutts gives guidelines and models that can help even the most befuddled users of today's complex word processing and desktop publishing software.

The management chapter is aimed at those who must oversee Others' writing in a company setting, but editors of publications can also benefit from its "middle way" approach. People tend to take their language and thoughts very seriously once they have put them into writing. Editors must take care to avoid offending with criticism and correction.

Chapter 18, "Writing better instructions," is one I took great interest in. In the army I had to suffer through many instruction and regulation manuals that were all but impossible to use while doing the tasks they were designed for. The thick volumes that come with computer software are a curse. As an EFL teacher, I hope I learned enough from Cutts because I have found it difficult to give simple, understandable instructions to my students. It is easy to forget that what seems like a digestible bit of information for the teacher can be an overwhelming stream of nonsense to the foreign language learner. Writing effective instructions is also a necessary activity for learners to do themselves. I hope to apply his ideas in my composition classes in the future--such as when students write up recipes.

It is a convention of the positive book review to lead into the conclusion by adding a few bad points. So well thought out and presented, so coherent and concisely complete is this book, I must skip the custom. The only thing I can think to write is that, since this is the type of book a writer or editor will want to have open by their computer, I do wish Oxford had given the paperback version a bit sturdier binding. In my copy some pages are in danger of falling out after I flattened the book to make it sit next to the computer. Although this is not a book specifically designed for ELT or EFL literacy, it is one that I recommend to anyone who deals with standard, written English for communication and professional purposes.