Mary Dash's Writing Tips
plainlanguage.gov
plainlanguage.gov
Do you doubt me? Consider the opening paragraph:
Readers prefer active voice sentences, and we should try to use the active voice in most of our business writing to communicate our message most effectively. Active voice clearly identifies the action and who is performing that action. Unfortunately, much of government writing is in the passive voice, giving documents a wordy, bureaucratic tone. Over time, writing in the passive voice simply becomes a habit, one we should all work to change.
Here is a quick redraft:
We should use the active voice in most of our business writing. Readers prefer it, and will better understand our message. This style clearly identifies what the action is, and who is doing it. Unfortunately most government writing is in the passive voice. This gives documents a wordy, bureaucratic tone. We need to break that habit.
The message has not changed, but readability improved a lot. Use https://app.readable.com/text/ to test that. The required reading level went from grade 10 to advanced grade 5, and other measures of readability also improved.
This is a big difference. https://www.wyliecomm.com/2019/03/us-literacy-rate/ reports on a broad survey of adult literacy rates. Only 2% of US adults read and write at a grade 11 or better level. By contrast 48% read and write at a grade 6 or better level. My redraft is readable by an order of magnitude more people.
What did I change?
1. Break up complex sentences.
2. Shorter is better.
This isn't hard. But it really makes a difference.
This kind of simplicity always gets praise in work environments, without explicitly being identified as "simplicity".
Your rewrite was particularly skilled. Sometimes, it's hard to see that some things aren't adding value.
Another tip:
-In Emails, liberally use new paragraphs. Sometimes, even one sentence paragraphs are ok.
I think this is because any way of compartmentalizing writing in non-trivial ways improves comprehension. It gives cues on how to digest the ideas in the writing.
They're more than ok -- they're a great attention management device! Don't worry about stuffy rules of prose when writing an email.
I have come to appreciate over time that most people have an inbuilt, highly intuitive command of where commas should go, and that any two people will disagree mightily over it. To me, those commas can be removed, but doing so disrupts the readability of the sentence since they are usefully signalling where one might pause—but I know from experience that plenty of people, including fluent native speakers of English, use way fewer commas than I do.
Please remember that simple words do not imply simple ideas. As Hemingway said when criticized for his simple language, Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.
If you are a government service, you will serve people who are not native speakers.
I moved to Germany when I didn't speak German. The government uses complex language to talk to people who don't speak German. It made me angry, and I wanted to do better.
In my opinion, sentences that start with the condition are easier to read. You already know if they are relevant to you.
For example, "If you meet condition A, you must do B" is easier to parde than "You must do B if you meet condition A".
I also avoid idioms. They are fun, but they are hard to understand.
I have many other tricks, but your two tricks are the most important.
1. There was a cat in the house. She had not been fed by her owner that morning. She meowed loudly at the passing postman.
2. There was a cat in the house. Her owner hadn't fed her that morning. She meowed loudly at the passing postman.
Also, who is the intended audience of style guides such as this? One's style in a romantic letter is necessarily different from the tone used in a scientific paper, both of which are different from how one would tell a story to a friend. Without nuance, a one-size-fits-all approach to linguistic style will destroy much that is beautiful about the world.
I find your first example "stays in key" if you will. Or literally, with the subject.
However, in the context of getting shit done, I'm thinking active is generally best.
In general, 2 good principles are:
1. Put the punch at the end of a sentence.
2. Put familiar information at the beginning of a sentence and new information toward the end.
The passive voice can help you with both of these design goals.
Orwell talked about where the passive voice is most dangerous/bad. It mainly comes down to thoughtlessness or insincerity. The passive voice removes or hides the actor, so it's useful for people trying to cloak their beliefs or hide assumptions.
"Politics and the English Language" is a great read, as is the book "Style."
Since you bring up "Politics and the English Language", I'll pull up some "Fear and Loathing of the English Passive":
> This is not a statistical quirk. Orwell’s writing features significantly more passives than typical prose. By one count, on average in typical prose about 13% of the transitive verbs are in the passive, whereas in Orwell’s essay ‘Politics and the English language’ it is 20% (Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, p. 720, citing Bryant 1962). My own counts, adhering strictly to the definitions of Huddleston & Pullum et al. (2002), are somewhat higher (probably because I include passive participles used as modifiers rather than complements, which for some reason many grammarians miss), but the ratio is unchanged: by my count, about 17% of the transitive verbs in random prose are likely to be passive, while a careful count of the whole of Orwell’s essay shows that 26% are passive. By either count, then, Orwell uses more than one and a half times as many passives as typical writers.
That is, "egregious" used to mean—even as recent as in Orwell's time—"blatant, obvious, unconcealed, glaring". But apparently all such words also gain a secondary shade of meaning "bad" and come to mean "baltantly, openly bad, and proud of it".
All the more reasons to use smaller, shorter words.
> 2 good principles are:
> 1. Put the punch at the end of a sentence.
> 2. Put familiar information at the beginning of a sentence and new information toward the end.
> The passive voice can help you with both of these design goals.
This is true, but another major use of passive voice is to put the punch of the sentence at the beginning. Where you want the punch is a stylistic choice; it's not always best at the end. And passive voice doesn't guarantee anything about where the punch will go -- that depends on which phrases hold the punch.
Phrasing a sentence in passive voice lets you present the pieces in a different order and changes which pieces are required vs. optional. Those are important and useful things to be able to do, but if we always wanted to do them the same way, we wouldn't need multiple options.
I believe they're usually referred to as "heavy" phrases[1], but the intuition is just that a phrase may consist of a lot of words, e.g. "the man who I spoke to yesterday about repairing the car". That phrase is, syntactically, just a noun phrase, and theoretically might fit into a sentence at any position where you might find "the cat" -- but in fact, phrases that heavy really, really benefit from being postposed if at all possible. Placing a heavy phrase in the middle of a sentence imposes memory burdens on the listener/reader that a short phrase like "the cat" wouldn't.
I bring it up partly because this is the kind of thing I find interesting, and partly because I think some editors might have this idea in mind, be unsure how to phrase it, and call it "the punch", when "the punch" is a better fit for a phrase that is felt to be especially relevant, surprising, or otherwise possessed of high emotional energy.
[1] e.g. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10936-010-9163-x -- "Heavy-NP shift is the tendency for speakers to place long direct object phrases at the end of a clause rather than next to the verb."
"it is a truth universally acknowledged" -> impersonal construction
"a single man... must be in want of a wife" -> this is active voice, man is still the subject of the sentence and be is the the only verb. "Want" is a noun. See https://www.dictionary.com/browse/want, definition 14.
There is no finite passive verb, but "acknowledged" is a passive form in the sentence in question. It's just a participle rather than a finite verb.
I find this attitude troubling in combination with the argument made all over this thread that you can tell the people who say not to use passives are full of it because they can't even identify a passive when they're looking at one. (And you're at least flirting with that argument in your comment above.)
It's completely true that the advice not to use passives is spurious. That advice is an American cultural phenomenon in the same way that advice not to sleep in a room with a running electric fan is a Korean cultural phenomenon, and it's just as valid.
But it's kind of difficult to simultaneously make the arguments that (1) You don't know what you're saying; you can't even tell whether a verb is passive or not, and (2) OK, this verb is passive and I didn't notice, but that shouldn't take anything away from my arguments.
I'd prefer to see the case for passive usage made based on the actual purpose the passive serves (letting you rearrange the elements of the sentence, so that the order in which they are presented better suits the overall flow of the discourse) than based on gotchas.
This week has been busy and stressful and I wrote both comments quickly and off the cuff. It's not that I can't tell that acknowledged is a passive participle, it's just that I didn't even look at it because I was pattern matching against common mistakes I've seen people make. It was only afterwards that I noticed that the parent comment specifically pointed to the word "acknowledged."
> I find this attitude troubling in combination with the argument made all over this thread that you can tell the people who say not to use passives are full of it because they can't even identify a passive when they're looking at one. (And you're at least flirting with that argument in your comment above.)
This is not what I'm saying, and it's not the argument I would make if I were actually making an argument. I said very few words, and not very carefully chosen ones, and you're putting words into my mouth. I made no case for or against passive voice. I just thought I saw a mistake briefly and I was trying to point it out.
Not quite, the original is very explicit about who acknowledges the truth in question.
What do you think is the difference between "it is a truth universally acknowledged" and "it is a truth acknowledged by all"?
While it doesn't have the same punch (possibly because just lacking the familiarity), what spoils the joke about "Everyone acknowledges that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife"?
EDIT: mrob points out elsewhere (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22604262), there regarding the use of 'all', that words like 'everyone' may imply literally every single person in a way that 'universally' doesn't; but then this may easily be dealt with by a constrution like "The mass of humanity acknowledges …" or "Civilised society acknowledges …".
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNRhI4Cc_QmsihIjUtqro...
It’s also worth pointing out that the Mary Dash link makes the error that many “authorities” on writing make by using this as an example of why passives are bad:
> My car was driven to work by me.
In fact, as Pullum explains, this is simply ungrammatical. No native speaker would ever say it because there is an information structuring constraint on passive clauses that makes this sentence ungrammatical.
From the examples, it seems to be more about avoiding French- and Latin-derived words, and using Germanic-derived ones instead. We do tend to use our Norman root words in legal and other formal registers, and Anglo-Saxon roots do have a more active feel to them. And some of the examples are best left to legal documents ("pursuant", "concur"). It's probably decent advice to a novice writer, especially one who has been learning from academic or government writing and picked up an unnecessary sense of formality.
But they're hardly "gobbledygook". They're perfectly cromulent words, with shades of meaning different from their "synonyms", and can be used to enhance writing rather than obscure it.
The people who write for governmental agencies tend to be highly educated people, and highly educated people have a bad habit of thinking that if they aren't constantly demonstrating how highly educated they are, someone will come along and take all their certificates away. So they lard their prose down with ten-dollar words, which makes sure that the only thing their readers will come away with is a sense of just how smart they are. (Or think they are, anyway.)
For a writer, the road to hell is paved with thesaurus pages. Use simple words, and anyone with basic literacy will be able to understand you.
- shall
- one as a pronoun
- whom (instead of “incorrectly” writing who)
- sentences with lots of clauses
- basically any uncommon word, especially a long word or one with an uncommon morphology that makes it hard to sound out
People with poor literacy will not be able to scan text and so every sentence and paragraph should be short and to the point (as it may be read in its entirety and if it is too long it will be skipped). I think something like 40% of the US has this level of literacy.
Incidentally, writing for an audience like this improves the efficiency and engagement of mere literate people too.
As an unrelated point: many legal phrases use both a Germanic and Romance word, eg assault and battery; breaking and entering
I had to look up "cromulent." Your use was in jest, right?
(I'm disappointed to report that Firefox isn't convinced of the cromulence of cromulent.)
They're not obscure, but they are formal. "More" and "buy" are informal.
https://monzo.com/tone-of-voice/
Also, The Economist has really great English. Despite being quite well-known for using very obscure words now and then the bulk of its writing is very clear, with succinct sentences and everyday words (they often use words like "stuff" in exactly the same way as spoken English). I don't always agree with its editorial stance but I find its style very enjoyable.
Orwell's Six Rules for Writing are great as well (along with pretty much everything he wrote):
https://infusion.media/blog/george-orwells-six-rules-for-wri...
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/19981111185743/https://plainlang...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20051113011109/http://www.plainl...
The passive voice is really the passive-aggressive voice, and I recommend taking every opportunity to antagonize it when someone uses it on you. It's not polite and euphemistic, it's bureaucratic, pseudo-intellectual, and bullying.
They suggest the use of "you", but I feel pretty good about using "we" in its place quite often.
For example: "we can now see that x is in fact greater than 10" sounds a lot less demanding than "you can now see ...".
I, the author, am also a reader.
"Although Mr. Doe was found to be eligible for this position; all of the positions in Boston had already been filled by our personnel office prior to receiving his application."
to sound much better than:
"Though we found Mr. Doe eligible for the position, our personnel office had filled all positions in Boston before we received his application."
YMMV
Before: "The applicant shall be notified by registered mail in all cases where the permit applied for is not granted, and shall be given 30 days within which to appeal such decision."
After: "We will notify you by registered mail if we reject your application. You must file an appeal of that decision within 30 days."
That changes the meaning to make it sound like appeal is mandatory. It should be something like "If you choose to appeal that decision, you must file your appeal within 30 days."
Im quite sure this post needed editing however ;)
When writing reports and documentation I prefer formal language, but for blogs I switch over to informal.
https://plainlanguage.gov/guidelines/audience/
IBM has some guidance on this too, as part of their design system:
https://www.carbondesignsystem.com/guidelines/content/genera...
Basically IBM's rule seems to be: there's never a need to be _formal_, but you should be less conversational on specific tasks, and more conversational on high-level docs and marketing material.
Even in reports and documentation, your audience will thank you if you sound like a human. Now, documentation has to be precise, and therefore has to define and use terms precisely. But documentation also contains description, and that description should be written informally when possible.
Edit: Ignore this. ucarion said it better.
I've settled on a mix: plain language that expresses intent and the key points (not just using a thesaurus to replace jargon). And at the end, a hyper-detailed technical notes, methodology, and references section. The goal is any expert who's read the tech notes can read the report and understand the assumptions and math behind each statement.
Personally, I like this kind of reporting. Read the tech notes to check that it's reliable, then read the report with peace of mind. I was going to "translate" the jargon into basic concepts anyway, so this saves a step.
This advice is not my own. It is ancient, and you could say it is the gist of books like The King's English by the brothers Fowler (1906), The Elements of Style by Strunk and White (1959), On Writing Well by William Zinsser (1976), and The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker (2014).
Bureaucratic language to me means wordiness, vagueness, and indirection. Conversational is often wordy too and likewise short on substance. But while bureaucratic sounds like it came from a robot, conversational puts the writer too much in the spotlight.
The reader comes to a piece of writing to learn something. The purpose of writing is to help the reader, as quickly and clearly as possible. The techniques in the books I mentioned, or on plainlanguage.gov, are meant to help you do just that.
Lists tend not to make great HN submissions because there isn't much to discuss beyond the lowest commmon denominator of the items on the list. That leads to generic discussions and specific discussions are better.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Generally speaking, I think it's because this advice is very easy to remember and repeat. Passive voice is easy to spot. Someone reading to look for errors can easily go "Aha! You did a naughty here." because they were once told that "passive = bad".
A whole list of evidence to the contrary:
http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/grammar/passives.html#passivepostlis...
For example:
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1504
> "On religious tolerance, he gently referenced the Christians of Lebanon and Egypt, then lamented that the 'divisions between Sunni and Shia have led to tragic violence' (note the use of the passive voice)."
The only way that statement is in the "passive voice" is if you want to ding the speaker for not blaming someone specific; that is, it's only in the passive voice in the political sense. Grammatically, it's in the active voice.
Here's a piece on what the passive voice is: