It’s Official: Eschew Obfuscation

A modest revolution is underway in Washington, aimed at getting the federal government to stop using needlessly dense language when it talks to ordinary people. From now on, official statements, rules and directives are supposed to be written briefly and in plain language.

Redundancy and jargon are out. The passive voice must yield to the active. Thus we might one day see President Clinton step forward to concede “I screwed up,” instead of reporting obliquely in the classically Reaganesque phrase that “mistakes were made.”

The anti-gobbledygook movement probably won’t cause a lot of excitement--the fact that Vice President Al Gore was sent out to announce it all but guarantees that--but it nonetheless is a cause for celebration. Modern life is complicated enough without having to spend frustrating hours trying to decipher what the Internal Revenue Service wants or what the Social Security Administration is trying to tell you or why a means of egress can’t simply be called the way out.

Using plain English is an effort not to dumb down government but rather to make it more accessible, comprehensible and efficient--in short, to have it serve the citizenry better. Constant vigilance will be needed to prevent backsliding, for there is something in the bureaucratic soul that apparently cannot abide directness and clarity in language, that shies from using a single simple word when three or four polysyllabic ones come to mind. George Orwell offered a classic example in his essay “Politics and the English Language”:

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

Orwell was paraphrasing Ecclesiastes: “The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong.” In that same essay he writes, “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.” Something that bureaucrats and politicians and the public they serve ought to remember.