A simple guide on words to avoid in government
civilservice.blog.gov.uk
civilservice.blog.gov.uk
If you stop using jargon then people assume you don't know what you're talking about. This affect is real. Your precieved credibility goes way down when you stop speaking in jargon.
It's the reason that the speaker used all of the tech jargon (launching a website). If they didn't do that then we would think they didn't know about websites.
> It's the reason that the speaker used all of the tech jargon (launching a website). If they didn't do that then we would think they didn't know about websites.
To "launch" something is jargon?
Steven Pinker in The Language Instinct.
Ostensibly it's to increase precision and allow experts to communicate quickly with each other. However that explaination can't explain phrases like "Ring-fence", "Let's take this offline", "360 degree feedback". All of those phrases have better simple English translations.
Jargon exists because specialists in a subject want to communicate quickly among themselves, instead of paraphrasing all the time. I'm a mathematician, if I had to use plain-English words instead of jargon in my papers, I would go insane. But my papers aren't meant for the general public (although they're welcome to read them), they're meant for a specialist audience. This is not the case of government websites.
For example "360 degree feedback" is when a manager's direct report is asked to give feedback about their manager. In other words you give feedback about your boss, often to your boss.
It doesn't really make sense as a phrase or metaphor. It should really be 180 degree feedback because if you turn 360 degrees you're facing the same way that you started.... But that makes it even better jargon. It signals that you've been on some management training courses.
Not if it's a boat or a plane. Otherwise, probably yes.
I don’t know what other word to use for launching a website but maybe there’s a better one.
For the general public, you could use: Make website, build website, develop website, update website, create a new page. To an expert those feel wrong because they all mean slightly different things, the jargon is being used incorrectly.
That's exactly how government people feel when you mis-use: "ring fenced budget", "allocate money to", "assign money to", "raise money for". Those all mean slightly different things and using them wrong feels wrong and marks you out as someone who doesn't know what they're talking about.
My thinking is that if by "launched" we mean "deployed to production" then it's useless for the end user. If it's not deployed to production, then the user has nothing to visit so for all intents and purposes of the end user you haven't built anything (or launched).
The "portal" term is deeply overused, because it means so many different things to so many different people. Sometimes it means a special site for a particular topic; sometimes it means a landing page.
That's the problem with jargon. A lot of people hear a term, think they understand it, and then use it. They often have the wrong end of the stick, but they will not let go of their understanding of the word.
That's why jargon exists. It is much better to use 3NF or BCNF or simply normalize or denormalize than to bury the point in many words. .
Those do not increase precision and phrases like "let's take this offline" are even more confused. Are they talking about an annoying idea in a meeting or a broken web server?
I do agree that some technical jargon can help communication between experts. Understanding the jargon marks you out as an expert. That's the root of why so much status-signalling jargon exists.
If someone says let's circle back to topic X they probably know a lot about project management...
I generally find hacker news interpretation of business jargon as uncharitable and unnessarily hostile. Not sure why such an innoccous expression like 'circle-back' sends people into fits of rage. There is good reason to be circumspect about heavy project-management overhead as its often misapllied, but that really has nothing to do with this jargon.
HN probably has a higher proportion of people who prefer a slightly more direct style of communication, and enjoy working with code which is much more functional IO than working with humans. If those people are coming to HN to blow off steam, that’s what you should expect - doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be disastrous if anyone tried to implement it in the real world.
Because it’s not innocuous, it’s fucking obnoxious, that’s what.
Just as I was thanking my deities of choice a few years ago that “touch basing” all the time had become uncool and all but disappeared from the workplace parlance, now all of a sudden everyone is happily “circling back” to topics of choice. It seems to be coming and going in waves.
This new hotness of a slang is also particularly shitty because it alludes to going through a few rounds of unnecessary talk before getting to the point.
It’s also one thing if one person is doing this, but if everyone and their dog keep circling back to stuff, it sounds quite idiotic.
The only thing that’s even worse is when a manager adopts military terminology while knowing nothing whatsoever about military.
A good example of this is "learnings". I have seen multiple managers use the word "learnings", usually in in phrases like, "What were our learnings from this?" Or, "What learnings can we take away?" But there's already a perfectly fine word to use: lessons! The only reason to use "learnings" instead of "lessons" is to show that you're a serious manager. It's just empty signalling.
Similarly, "ring fence". Is it really that much better than, "set aside"? Does it add any nuance, or is it just meaningless change for change's sake?
I am far more tolerant of jargon in law and technology than I am of it in business, because, in my experience, legal and technology jargon does function as shorthand, putting complex topics into a labeled box that allows the speaker to quickly make their point without having to repeat a bunch of knowledge that the audience can be assumed to be familiar with. Business jargon, on the other hand, is far more often merely different for the sake of being different.
I can’t really comment on Signalling, but the word learnings isn’t a new and modern invention. It’s in Shakespeare!
It’s also a fallacy to think that there’s a canon of ‘acceptable’ words we can choose from, nor that we are only allowed one word per concept. Language evolves over time and acquires meaning through use.
I think it's starting to go the other direction. As a technical-minded person if I have a business meeting and the other person starts throwing those yuppie buzzwords in my face I'll just mentally put them in the "empty suit with an MBA" bin.
It might be my Southern European sensibilities, but I value straightforwardness very highly than time wasting nonsense to signal you're part of the in crowd. Unless the hacker ethos has died, and we're back to the 1980 where middle managers in business suits are the cool guys.
Hell, your comment is full of jargon. "Yuppie", "buzzword", "suit" (and "empty suit"), ...
[0] though it's usually very contextual when that's the case, which is really frustrating when things are taken out of context and either become completely unintelligible, or easily misinterpreted (and sometimes wilfully misrepresented).
Avoiding business jargon doesn't mean having to stick to the 1000 most used English words.
In any case, your language here would certainly run afoul of the "simple English" the OP is espousing, and the OP terms such things "jargon", so contextually, yes, it's jargon.
Although personally I agree, the OP is using a particularly sloppy definition of "jargon", which often has a stronger technical connotation than merely metaphorical or business newspeak language.
Which the article points out, though not plainly, should be avoided.
It means “young urban professional.”
Sorry to burst your bubble but that’s jargon.
> Yuppie isn't jargon, I was thinking about the movie American Psycho.
It’s also jargon.
> It's just a term to refer to your stereotypical middle managers high on their own farts.
I know what those terms mean.
> business jargon
Oh wow look at those goalposts flying by, amazing.
When I wear a T-shirt from a Hackathon to a developer conference I'm signalling just as hard as the sales rep in the suit.
It doesn't necessarily mean that I'll have to go the other way and adopt the mannerisms of the annoying tech guy.
> and we're back to the 1980 where middle managers in business suits are the cool guys.
Nope, we are at the 20's, when social-only corporate climbers know not to use suits on development-dominated cultures (not software development, but "creating new things from known principles" development). So suits are irrelevant nowadays and lost all signaling meaning.
Those hackers got cool and became the guys in the suits. Dollar Uber Alles
That's unnecessarily cynical. It certainly can give off that impression. But it is also a shortcut for people who work together in a specific domain to be more precise (or more general) than would be implied by non-jargon speech. So to me those things in the sky are just clouds, but to a meteorologist they might be stratocumulus or cirrus.
Another case, a similar one, is the stickiness of obsolete language in a certain domains. I've never used the word "cloture" in a sentence,* but to use it is faster for those who need it than to spell it out. In law, some obsolete words not only carry specific meaning but can call back to existing case law.
For HN, CPU is a good example, being an old word whose precise meaning is quite fluid (used to be literally the cabinet with merely the ALU and some registers; instruction decode was just how it was wired together) and so is jargon too.
* until writing that sentence of course.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use%E2%80%93mention_distinctio...
Also, C-3PO is short for See-Threepio, and is used for interacting with organics, while R2D2 is short for Artoo-Detoo, which is used for interacting with digitals and arguing with C-3P0, while TWKE-4 is short for Twiki, which is used for saying BDBDBDBD, which is short for Bee Dee Bee Dee Bee Dee Bee Dee.
Jargon has a slightly pejorative sense, just like in the article.
The article does not say, "Do not use the correct words for your discipline." It says, "Do not use meaningless words or overdramatize."
Not necessarily. Jargon is not technical. But it is an emergent feature of language in semi-isolated groups. Things get nicknamed, inside jokes stick, and from the outside it looks performative while inside it’s quite natural. That it subsequently often takes on a performative element, in particular by new comers, is an in-group mechanism, but it’s not always useless as a signalling mechanism. There even seems to be an in-built sense of disgust with respect to overly performative jargon that keeps the system in check most of the time.
Always consider your audience. If you're writing casual communications for a mixed audience, ditch the jargon and use simple words.
If you're speaking to professional peers on business matters, use the precise language. Don't unnecessarily complicate sentences or use complex words when simple words are equally effective, though.
Jargon === Signaling
Signaling === Status
Status === Power
Like it or not, it's what humans are wired to do.
That said, the wise do both. For example, use the acronym, but the spell it out as well. Well, you think about those who leverage signaling the most effectively, they tend to be more inclusive in their arc.
I think the point of removing jargon is to remove the "in" and "out" crowds as much as possible, at least for the mundane aspects of government.
I think that some people will still try to make an "in" crowd in which they are a member by introducing jargon, but separating people into these groups doesn't benefit most, so let's try to fight that.
Simple words is better as it is inclusive and also makes things understandable.
“Tubular” was a term of art for surfers before the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles showed up.
It’s a normal and natural thing to develop. But it’s also normal and good to have communications professionals mandate editorial standards so that people can understand outside of the niche.
* anti pattern → bad design
* key value store → (almost always) database
On that context, "stack" means exactly the set of all those things and a few more. You can't replace it by any one of those things. The alternative is enumerating all of them (that's what people used to do), what is bad (that's why people coined the "stack" term).
> anti pattern → bad design
Hum... Now are you talking about software architecture, UI, UX, communications design? Your replacement is confusing.
> key value store → (almost always) database
It is an specific kind of database, with performance characteristics that are completely different from the relational databases that the "database" word alone implies.
A mistake I often see myself making is that as soon as I get asked to do something I stop listening and start planning how I'm going to implement the solution. In many cases my preconceived solution will not solve the actual problem, because I've not actually found what the problem is that needs to be solved.
In many cases the requester doesn't really know what they are asking for and will need some prompting to actually think it through. This requires a discussion, rather than a simplistic request to define "use case".
I don't agree - unless you're using jargon to conceal your intrinsic lack of credibility.
If you really understand a thing, then you can explain it in plain words. The use of jargon serves to conceal from both the listener and the speaker that the explanation is shallow. It's like a "code smell".
The linguistic patterns (including jargon but also more than that) peg us as part of various subcultures, as educated or not, rich or not, from Florida or not. I was interviewing with some random dude who went to Duke and he said "You remind me of my college roommate." I'd known this dude for 15 minutes: what else could there be, really, other than linguistic cues? Naturally, I was offered the job.
Jargon _can_ mean that the explanation is shallow; it just depends on which jargon employed when. Take any jargon filled non-sense - you can say equally shallow things entirely without the jargon!
Just simple words and sentences, unambiguous. ELI5. Those guys know their stuff.
It does not mean to avoid all jargon, it means you should say what you mean, not say things in a way to satisfy 300 year old rules on jurisprudence for the statute books.
http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/campaigning/examples/governmen...
"Feynman was a truly great teacher. He prided himself on being able to devise ways to explain even the most profound ideas to beginning students. Once, I said to him, 'Dick, explain to me, so that I can understand it, why spin one-half particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics.' Sizing up his audience perfectly, Feynman said, 'I'll prepare a freshman lecture on it.' But he came back a few days later to say, 'I couldn't do it. I couldn't reduce it to the freshman level. That means we don't really understand it.'"
— Goodstein & Goodstein, Feynman's Lost Lecture: The Motion of Planets Around the Sun (Norton, New York, 1996)
This works in reverse. If you use enough jargon then you can often convince people that you know what you are talking about, even if you don't... :)
You will rarely get called on it because people hate to admit when they don't understand something.
flicking - do something fun
trolling - studying (opposite of flicking)
troll - someone who studies
infinite troll - someone who studies a lot
Boeing had the "tin benders" for structural engineers, and the "tube benders" for the hydraulics engineers.
In one company I worked at, the marketers were the "weasels" and the engineers were the "swine". A good piece of engineering was complimented as being "swinish".
Good times
So let them learn it the hard way. If people prefer to trust someone they don't understand over making the effort to understand what they are being told in simple words, they only reveal their own ignorance.
I once was reprimanded in school (in absentia), for choosing my words to impress and not to be understood. That was probably the most important lesson I ever received.
But I think you are wrong about why jargon exists: Jargon lets us express complex ideas in a very compressed way, because, among peers, we understand exactly what is being said. It is just detrimental to effective communication with people outside our area of expertise. So yes, sometimes "NOP sledge" says it all, while with a different audience one might just skip that subject...
Second, even if it were true, that would be all the more reason to stop it, because the reason is bad. It is selfish, at the expense of others. If you make things harder for people so that life is easier for you, then you are by definition evil.
"Short words are best, and old words are best of all." --- Winston Churchill
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/style-guide/a-to-z-of-gov-uk-sty...
The link to this style guide is provided at the end of the article. However the article does not link to the exact section "Words to avoid" which is almost at the bottom of the style guide. The above link is a direct link to that section in the style guide.
Can you guys shed some light?
Why is discussion better than dialogue? Work with better than collaborate? Concentrate on better than focus on?
Some of them are definitely debatable but that's the general trend.
What is the line between analogies and etymology?
Not really arguing with the specific choice, but considering words formed by analysis as harder to understand is a concept I've never seen before.
"Simpler and less flowery" is obviously not very well defined but it's also definitely a real spectrum. One of those things that needs taste and judgement.
For example, 'dialogue' to many people means a dialogue box on a computer screen. So that word is ambiguous. But a discussion has a primary meaning that is what the writer desires to use.
Particularly for non-native speakers, using secondary meanings of words can be confusing.
> The dialog box (also called dialogue box (non-U.S. English), ...
This is a British government website, so "dialogue box" might not be uncommon.
Some of us distinguish between program (software) and programme (a collection of projects)
In the same way, the instructions controlling a computer are a "program"; the TV drama with the dialogue is a "programme".
/me British English speaker (obv)
(This would also, if you squint a bit, serve as an example of "dialog" being short for dialog box.)
Another subtlety in English is that words with Germanic roots feel more direct and simple while those with Latin roots feel flowery and pretentious so the former are often preferred. E.g. ask/inquire, answer/response. It's not always true, and some words may still be out of date.
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Germanic_and_Latinat...
The Plain English campaign - whose work has been excellent over the decades - and diversity in CS hiring, have hopefully broken the worst parts of the language barrier.
[1] - silly example: while most of the office-working world would write a "memo", in CS Jargonese it was a "minute". To this day I have no idea why the distinction was important.
Ooh, That might explain why it was hard for me to understand!
I'm a Spaniard, so latin-derived words are usually familiar. That's what's keeping me from perceiving them as literary, since their Spanish counterpart is in my 'common speech register', so to speak.
"Focus" is a metaphor.
"Work with" is at a considerably simpler level of English education than "collaborate".
A "dialog" was originally a literary work with people responding to each other, so it's a bit more pretentious.
Also, a dialog has a slightly more argumentative feel than a discussion - there is more of a sense of opposition.
"We had a quick discussion to make sure we were on the same page and then had lunch." Dialog would be weird here.
"We are trying to start a dialog between one side and the other."
Though I guess that used in an international context (say, between countries) discussion would sound stranger than dialogue, and there is usually some degree of opposition between countries.
Would a better substitute not be 'remove'? To drive out something is to get rid of it.
Sorry... collaborate means to share focus, while work with is ambiguous. It may simply mean work at the same time.
> facilitate, say something specific about how you’re helping - for example, use ‘run’ if talking about a workshop
“Facilitate” is one of those words of which useless people doing useless work in an organization are very fond. I think that when asked to describe what specific work they are doing, they will just implode.
When it's used in a vaguer way then that I tend to agree with you.
It also names those activities of some essential people without whom no work ever manages to get done.
It seems like rephrasing with the replacement of many of these terms can make you think again and check that you aren't bullshitting a bit. "progress" => "Are we indeed actually working on this?"
I'll certainly consult this list in the future to check my writing for simplicity.
But on the other hand, it can be misused as well by reversing the left and right sides...
In particular because I was once very close to someone working in some UE-related organization in Brussels. They routinely complained about the EU having its own English, mentioning the use of "persons" where "people" would be more correct. This use is not mentioned in this publication, maybe "persons" is actually fine-ish.
I can see how many of these mistakes could come from the French language. Ah ah. Whoops. Sorry! :-) For instance, "foresee" used to mean "plan" where it really means "predict". I never made the mistake because I never made the connection myself, but in French "prévoir" indeed means both things.
I wonder how much French being used in Brussels has influenced this. But I guess many European languages are similar to French for many of these things.
Maybe some of these misuses are a testimony of the complexity of English, like the uncountable words, the prepositions or the usage rules of "allow".
Maybe English could adopt some of these uses that seem convenient. Like, "transpose" instead of "incorporate into".
And yes, I cringe a bit whenever I see "actually" used to mean "currently". It happens all the time.
I guess English has its peculiarities in each area where it is spoken, and Europe is not an exception to this…
And I mean, a big chunk of the English vocabulary is already French, we might as well continue the trend x)
British english especially can have some weird vocabulary which is hard to use if one is not actually from britiain and understands the implied meaning of the words.
adequate is a good example of this for instance. according to british english, adequate means that is barely doable/good enough, while in most german/latin based languages. Adequate means that it is satisfactory.
Par example, s'il vous plaît?
As a German native speaker reading the first few examples this just sounds a lot like literal translations from German that I hear a lot of German speakers use when their English level isn’t that advanced (as I often perceive it to be the case for politicians as well) or only used at work and not gained from using/being exposed to English in native/cultural contexts:
Actor – Aktoren (commonly used fancy word in German government communication)
Actorness (not a direct translation but very common in German to make any noun into a different one through pre-/suffixes)
Actual – aktuell (means current and definitely not actual)
Adequate – adequat (means appropriate and definitely not adequate)
- Acteur
- Actuel
- Adéquat
(we don't have anything like actorness to my knowledge though)
What did they think if actual does not come from German nor French? :-)
Meanwhile corporate German is very different, and notable for the use of English or pseudo-English words where perfectly good German words exist. And of course an unhealthy dose of euphemisms.
Regular German probably tends more to understatement (the highest praise is "there's nothing to complain about")
Ampel is so boring though!
It makes me think of people I met at a conference doing research on vertical people transportation. In other words, lifts, or elevators.
French does indeed. For instance, the government and the corporate world love to use vocabulary to downplay situations. Like "mouvement social" (social movement) for "grève" (strike). It's like people are moving a bit, like they are dancing. It's cute. Or "restructuration" for "massive layoffs". Newspeak is all over the place. Like the sibling commenter says about Germany, "an unhealthy dose of euphemisms". We also have all the faux English startup vocabulary that makes things feel much more extraordinary than they are, or positive when they are not particularly so. In part to make France look cool internationally probably ("French Tech" [1] - "technologies françaises" sounds boring I guess).
There are also tricks you can use to make things feel less acceptable, like saying "charge sociale" (social benefits charge, feels like social burden) for "cotisation sociale" (social security contribution).
[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Tech (this logo, yikes)
I click the link and I get a full screen pop up with the sentence in my face “cookies enable core functionality”
I’m trying to read some text man. All this tech and we can’t send a frickin link that opens to some text. Cmon.
> Receive users’ consent before you use any cookies except strictly necessary cookies.
it further explains:
> [Strictly necessary cookies] are essential for you to browse the website and use its features, such as accessing secure areas of the site. Cookies that allow web shops to hold your items in your cart while you are shopping online are an example of strictly necessary cookies. These cookies will generally be first-party session cookies. While it is not required to obtain consent for these cookies, what they do and why they are necessary should be explained to the user.
Makes me wonder why we have all these cookie consent dialogs, either it's people playing it safe or they really do not set cookies for a true purpose.
if the latter: then all that's happened with GDPR is that we've been given visibility to the problem.. and it feels like everyone (including governments apparently) will adopt some measure of dark patterns to ensure they can still track people.
Which would require showing this info somewhere even for essential cookies. Is a popup required for this?
https://termly.io/faq/do-i-need-a-cookie-policy-on-my-websit...
A bit funny that this page does show a large popup so that you can accept their use of cookies.
"We use essential cookies to make our site work. With your consent, we may also use non-essential cookies to improve user experience and analyse website traffic. By clicking 'Accept', you agree to our website's cookie use as described in our Cookie Policy. You can change your cookie settings at any time by clicking “Preferences”. Preferences/ Decline/ Accept"
if you're not doing that then they're telling you that you don't need a pop-up.
Most people, whether in government or in business, can't give a flying fsck about GDPR or whatever. They just want to get their primary job done, and to them stuff like GDPR is just legal red tape that's imposed on them and that serves no value whatsoever, merely serving as roadblocks slowing them down from doing their real job. They don't want to understand the intricacies of GDPR, they just want to get it over with as quickly as possible, which means slapping a cookie banner on the site, checking the "I am now compliant" checkbox that the GDPR officer nagged them with, and calling it a day. They don't want to go through the trouble of researching a couple of weeks what the best user-friendly way is of being GDPR compliant when they can just install a cookie banner in 5 minutes.
Sounds familiar? If you're a developer in a large corporation then I'm sure you have also been annoyed by the tons of security and firewall rules, and most of you would rather work around them than trying to understand why they exist and how to best comply to them both in mechanics and in spirit. Just like you're not deliberately trying to be evil and breaking the company's security, they're not deliberately being evil and trying to violate privacy.
Most people don't give a fuck about anything that isn't related to their current task. However, there are laws, and company must give a fuck about it and do such UX so that those that don't give a fuck are not fucked on spot.
They don't meet the legal definition of strictly necessary.
They don't really "track you" in any meaningful way - the most interesting info in the gov.uk cookies seems to be language (English or Welsh) and if the user provides it, country (England, Wales, Scotland or NI).
Still, the data falls under GDPR, so we get consent dialogs.
what you didnt mention is that:
> We also use LUX Real User Monitoring software cookies from SpeedCurve to measure your web performance experience while visiting GOV.UK.
stuff like this is why they need the consent dialog.
if instead of embedding tracing cookies and analytics JS they processed access logs, they would learn a lot without needing the dialog. However, since everyone just throws up the dialog (and users are trained to expect it) its “not worth solving”.
> These cookies will generally be first-party session cookies. While it is not required to obtain consent for these cookies, what they do and why they are necessary should be explained to the user
How do you explain to the user what those cookies do and why they are necessary?
Is it OK just to have an explanation on your site's terms of service page or on its legal page, or do you have to put it somewhere you are sure the user will see?
you do not need to issue a pop-up, you just need the user to be able to find the explanation if they want to.
Related to this post, the EU guidelines for inclusive language was a nice read for me.
https://www.scribd.com/document/543481333/Woke-commission-eu...
(The tables on page 10, 14, 17, etc, being for me the main point of interest)
The same PDF can be found here: https://www.scribd.com/document/543481333/Woke-commission-eu...
I am updating my link to the one you suggest.
The advice against using the phrase "combat problems" or even "key stakeholders" instead of just "stakeholders" seems somewhat pointless to me. I don't think these are changes that will significantly improve reader comprehension. Maybe avoiding the use of the word "stakeholder" at all will but they dont seem to want to go that far.
For example, you wrote "The advice [...] seems somewhat pointless to me." Well, are you saying that it is pointless, or not? I don't know you, so I don't know what your scale of pointlessness is. I don't know what "somewhat pointless" corresponds to. Is it a tiny bit pointless, is it a medium amount of pointlessness, something else? I don't know, but I have to think about it because you wrote a meaningless word in your sentence. And even once I have understood the sentence, I am left thinking: "well, if it's only somewhat pointless, maybe it's not pointless after all!"
The same thing happens with "key stakeholders": now I have to think about a hierarchy of stakeholders. What scale is being used? Who's key, who's non-key? Does the sentence apply to all stakeholders, only some of them?
Multiply this by a hundred occurrences in a long document, and you obtain something that will be more difficult to read. But government documents have to be readable by everyone: people whose native tongue is not English, uneducated people who have trouble reading simple texts, etc. And for what? Sugarcoating your text so that it's less assertive? Showing literary prowess?
I am stating something controversial and leaving open the possibility that I might be wrong or partially wrong.
What you are inadvertently arguing here is that humility is unnecessary.
> Why should the government water down documents and treat people like morons? It’s insulting.
Governments have the sometimes formal (e.g. ADA), sometimes informal requirement that its public-facing communication should be accessible to all citizens. Historically, that has been mostly seen in websites that were accessible to people with various disabilities, e.g. proper alt tags on images, subtitles in video / audio, ensuring legibility with high contrast and avoiding various forms of colors that have common color blindnesses associated, but given that over half of the US is barely able to comprehend a 6th grade text [1] and in the UK anything from 12 to almost 27% (depending on the state) has "very poor literacy skills", it makes sense to use simplified language.
Additionally, given that low literacy rates are usually closely related to socio-economic disadvantages and/or migration history, it is very important for those people to have information about basic government aid programs available in an even clearer, more simplified subset of English (and, if possible, also in the dominant languages of immigrants).
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2020/09/09/low-...
[2] https://literacytrust.org.uk/parents-and-families/adult-lite...
I suspect there might be a better approach... Eg. A 15 minute phone call or meeting once a year with a 'government expert', whos role is to ask about your life, and then enroll you in any government programs which you would benefit from.
For those who would benefit from government assistance and aren't making use of it, meetings could be longer or done with a subject area expert.
For example, in the UK, under 50% of people eligible for free monetary benefits from the government claim them.
These bureaucratic hurdles are by design to limit the amount of people actually using the services they are entitled to by law.
Seriously, avoid the exact domain-specific terms (“jargon”), don’t use “rich” figurative language (“tackle” is out)?
The recommendation is really going for the lowest common linguistic denominator, like it’s inspired from Simple English Wikipedia.
Weren’t we all supposed to elevate each other? Now it seems we aim for a common soft mushy muddy bottom.
(“Elevate”, “aim”... off with me head!)
Has the UK government thrown in the towel wrt education, and now just goes for bare minimum?
What’s next, stopping the teaching of grammar in schools? :)
Changed “general population” to “population”
See, it already had an effect on my writing.
Thanks for the laugh!8-)) Now go have a cup of coffee.
Roughly 30% of English speakers in the UK are bilingual (or more).
The aim of this is not to improve peoples english ability, it's to ensure that they can understand and access the relevant gov services they require.
There are a significant amount of Gov services available from childhood to adult education to learn, or improve their English separately to this.
Have you really launched a website, or just started one? Since the same article rejects the use of 'drive' and 'land', I'd say that 'launch' is fairly comparable.
'the hours of non-hours work worked by a worker in a pay reference period shall be the total of the number of hours spent by him during the pay reference period in carrying out the duties required of him under his contract to do non-hours work.'
The problem they encountered is that the government still needs to be able to specify what they mean with precision. So what happened is that common words became overloaded with specific and often non-obvious legal meanings.
People at large with no clue how to "speak government" still didn't understand what the government said, but instead of a bunch of known unknowns it turned the language into a minefield of unknown unknowns.
(This got at least some attention notice during the covid pandemic, during which there was clear miscommunication between the government which used 'recommendations' to mean a strong non-legal mandate, and parts of the public which took it to mean helpful tips, like a movie recommendation)
Yes, they are both voluntary, but the nuance is quite different. That ambiguity in nuance is a problem, given that "recommendation" is the strongest wording for a non-legal mandate the Swedish government will use.
Just as programmers invented programming languages to unambiguously express an idea, the legal system uses legal jargon to unambiguously express an idea. Getting rid of jargon means you need to express specific meanings some other way. The Swedish government chose overloading specific meanings to ambiguous words, which is really strictly worse than legal jargon.
Unfortunately that distinction was deliberately obfuscated by the UK Government during the COVID crisis. They would issue "guidelines" that you could be arrested for violating. As I recall, they began as real guidelines, and morphed into legal mandates without ever becoming laws.
- http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/
And related free guides page:
- http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/free-guides.html
———————
Wikipedia also has a “simple” version here:
That website has nothing to do with the government.
Just kidding... A bit off topic perhaps.
I too was on an intranet team, and I too often received requests for a "portal". It took me a long time to grasp why they were so fond of that word. Was a "portal" subtly different from a "page" or "site"? After many years, I concluded that a "portal" is a page with a bunch of links on it --- a hypertextual table of contents, if you will, for the requester's department or project.
I did not work in government, just for a large company. This article is useful because highfalutin language is commonplace in any bureaucracy.
hmmm
Here a direct link: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/style-guide/a-to-z-of-gov-uk-sty...
There's a reason why we have jargon and acronyms. They condense a lot of information into few words.
Especially in what?
In IT (a term most of HN (a term most of Hacker News understands) understands), it is probably OK to agree the really common jargon that everyone probably knows. HTTP, WWW, etc. But be cognizant that eBPF for example isn't something you can assume everyone knows what it is. Use it, but then expand or include a link to where it is defined.
"We don't 'drive' anything forward unless we're in a car, and we haven't opened a 'one-stop shop' as we're not a supermarket. We've probably launched a website."
But there is a place for esoteric terms. I just try to write with my audience in mind. Sometimes that's with technical terms other times with everyday metaphors.
For instance:
Danish company: "We're doing great, here's how much we made last quarter". Or: "You fucked up, don't do that."
Norwegian company: "We be looking to aligning our pricing strategy using market benchmarks." "We'll be needing to conduct a behavioral correction session in the near future to ensure that you better understand your role in our organizational structure".
US company: .... I can't... you get a three page email with long words, no obvious structure to the text, only to make a single point. You're not really sure what that point was, even if you spend 45 minutes trying to parse the content.
Generally speaking, use fewer words, try not to communicate just because you think you must.
Do not use "amazing", use very good.
Do not use "extraordinary", use very good.
Do not use "incredible", use very good.
Do not use "terrific", use very good.
Do not use "abominable", use very bad.
Do not use "awful", use very bad.
Do not use "horrible", use very bad.
Do not use "terrible", use very bad.
I’m not really the audience… at least I don’t remember becoming a British civil servant, but I’d still love to know some examples.
Separately:
“ We often wonder whether we're expecting colleagues to open the single front door or step through the portal and find themselves in the one-stop shop. In nine out of 10 cases, what people really want is some new pages on our intranet.”
I would bet that in nine out of ten cases the people don’t know what they really want up front. When I get similar requests, and ask for concrete details for expectations, quite often they simply can’t provide them. It’s a feeling they have.
Of the 6, the most quirky seems the "British Subject":
"You became a British subject on 1 January 1983 if, until then, you were either:
a British subject without citizenship, which means you were a British subject on 31 December 1948 who did not become a citizen of the UK and Colonies, a Commonwealth country, Pakistan or Ireland a person who had been a citizen of Ireland on 31 December 1948 and had made a claim to remain a British subject.
You also became a British subject on 1 January 1983 if you were a woman who registered as a British subject on the basis of your marriage to a man in one of these categories. "
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/22/new-zealand-ho...
Even if there's such a law, people will find a way around it.
Then what is the point of a metaphor?
Point, unless talking about a sharp object
;)
[0]: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200710-the-words-that-...
(Plus, you used a metaphor in your question: "point")
Reminds me of „Metaphors we Live By” https://george-lakoff.com/books/metaphors-we-live-by/
But the very next sentence:
>We've probably launched a website
Surely we don’t launch anything unless it’s a boat or a rocket?
I mostly agree with the author, but they nicely demonstrated how hard it is to avoid jargon.
I can get behind that.
Some words, like "hub" are, to me, so overused that they've lost all meaning.
Also there's a group of people who use jargon without understanding what they're saying, which would have been harmless if not for the positions they often have.
These are real life words from a real life human, recently observed: "The value drivers reducing company spend"
Spend is a verb and value is not street-legal here in the states.
Better known as "lessons", or "things we've learned".
"Utilize" is a word, but I don't think it means the same as "use". I think it means "to take something that is useless, and make it useful", or "to turn something into a tool". So you could utilize a written-off car as a source of parts, perhaps.
If you utilize "utilize" to mean "use", you're indulging in grand language to look more authoritative. And nobody utilizes "utilize" in spoken English.
But a disclaimer: in my native language "utilize" is relatively common.
What about football (soccer)?
I think people just assimilate it, don't question why and then re-iterate it.
As others have said, it is also an example of "weasel words". Words that are designed to make what you are saying sound more impressive.
Case in point, niggard [0] has cost people their jobs. Wikipedia maintains a list of controversies[1].
[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/niggard
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_the_word...
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/09/08/professor-sus...