Raja M
“Die, gobbledygook!” cry a Kolkata-based band of language revolutionaries working to free English from the intimidating, mind-strangling jargon, officialese and legalese confusing our lives. They work to persuade corporates, professionals and the fellow on the road to a life made simpler with straightforward communication.
“Clear English is good for your business,” these language doctors say, quoting cases such as General Electric saving US$275,000 by redrafting its user manuals in plain English and a Hong Kong study finding that a financial-services company lost about HK$2,685,600 (US$345,640) a year through senior staff wasting 30 minutes a day editing their colleagues’ work.
Working with the UK-based Plain English worldwide movement, Clear English India has held successful workshops with ICICI, India’s largest non-government-owned bank, and offers workshops for information-technology professionals, companies, business people, bureaucrats, lawyers and teachers. Every simplified document that a corporate client sends out earns a “Clear English India” stamp.
A pioneering initiative of media veterans Jyoti Sanyal and Ajoy John, this language-clarity movement looms as an idea of the “why didn’t we think of it before” kind. Sanyal, author of the The Statesman Style Book, told Asia Times Online that he was moved to start the project because of “dismay that built up within me through 30 years of editing reporters’ garbage as a sub-editor in an English-language newspaper, readers’ eager response”, and “the rather ambitious desire to rewrite in plain language such provisions of Indian law as all citizens most need to know”. Sanyal, 61, tied up with Martin Cutts, who launched the plain-language movement in the United Kingdom.
The Derbyshire-based UK Plain Language Commission, a non-governmental business entity, works with a wide array of organizations including government departments, financial-services companies, corporates, local-governance bodies and international law firms.
On the Clear English India website is a “decoded” version of India’s important Right to Information Act that was passed last year empowering red-tape-tyrannized citizens to copy official documents, question the government and inspect files. A sample of gobbledygook killed:
Where access to the record or a part thereof is required to be provided under this Act and the person to whom access is to be provided is sensorily disabled, the Central Public Information Officer or State Public Information Officer, as the case may be, shall provide assistance to enable access to the information, including providing such assistance as may be appropriate for the inspection.
Jyoti Sanyal translated this 65-word mind-bender to: “If a physically challenged person seeks information under this Act, the Central or State Public Information Officer must help him or her access the information.”
Clear English India’s anti-gobbledygook weapons involve using common, everyday words (instead of language relics such as “hereinafter”, “heretofore” etc) except for necessary technical terms, use of “you” and other pronouns, using active voice, and using short sentences.
“Mindsets are hard to change,” said Ajoy John, who worked editorially with leading publications in Kolkata before establishing his own design and media agency, Bee iDeas. “People love the bullshit, such as using ‘Siamese twins’ like ‘null and void’, ‘terms and conditions’ - both words mean the same.”
He said the communication diseases were inherited from India’s colonial past and earlier practices in Britain such as paying lawyers for the number of words they used in legal documents. “Governments, businesses and service providers need to communicate to the common man in a language they understand, and not have them run to someone else to explain what it’s about. That’s unfair.”
Not surprisingly, Clear English India found the biggest resistance came from lawyers of its corporate clients. “They told us if simple language is used loopholes would creep in,” said Ajoy. “But when we simplified their legal documents and asked them to point out legal loopholes, they couldn’t.”
He narrated how a young lawyer told him that 100-page plaints that judges get bombarded with from lawyers can be reduced to two or three pages in plain English, easier to grasp, easier to judge and easier to clear the 30 million cases pending in Indian courts. And imagine the forests saved from thousands of tonnes of paper no longer needed.
Clear English India aims to free citizens from exploitation by vested interests and priests of professional communication who feel threatened with decreased relevance if their ritualistic jargon and arcane babble were removed. “How many us can understand a balance sheet or company annual reports?” asked Ajoy.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission, a client of the Plain Language Commission, notes that plain English “does not mean deleting complex information to make the document easier to understand. For investors to make informed decisions, disclosure documents must impart complex information. Using plain English assures the orderly and clear presentation of complex information so that investors have the best possible chance of understanding it.”
Sanyal is unimpressed with India being the third-largest English-speaking country in the world. “Indians’ supposed ‘edge’ in English over other Asian nations is overrated,” Sanyal informed ATol. “Only between 3% and 4% of Indians use English. And few of them are ‘effective’ speakers: they tend to be verbose and tend to translate their idioms into English; the more garrulous among them use a great deal of pre-[World War II] cliches.”
Movements such as Clarity, an international plain-language group, seem to be catching on a bit in Malaysia, said Sanyal. “China is too busy with introducing English to give any thought to standards. That would be true of Thailand and Japan, too. Asian countries have similar problems when it comes to learning the English language. Asian languages behave in ways that are very different from the way of English. Unless Asian countries recognize the need for an ‘Asian approach’ to English, there can be little progress.”
So Sanyal firmly believes hiring native speakers to teach Asians English is a bad idea: “A total dependence on employing native speakers of English, the rage in all Southeast Asian countries, will never solve the problem for Asians; it can only exacerbate the problem.”
While such language movements have their critics (questioning the expertise in clarity), the fact remains that clear communication is oxygen of daily life. While the speed, frequency and means of our communication has increased exponentially, the clarity and quality of content of communication suffer from less thought and effort. Ajoy John says his group’s emphasis is not on grammar dogmas but on the obvious need for clarity in communication.
ATol queried the Clear English website, saying: “Why do we say, ‘That only is the problem,’ when it should be, ‘That’s the problem’?” Sanyal responded: ‘”That only is the problem’ is not a ‘cultural idiosyncrasy’; it is a forced translation into English of a Tamil idiom (adhu mattum/mattum). Idiom, the language people use at a particular time or in a particular place, keeps changing, but the idiom of one language can never be translated into another; the result turns ludicrous.”
It was ludicrous enough for a leading software company in southern India to invest $671,000 in teleconferencing because its American staff couldn’t figure out the kind of English their Indian counterparts used in e-mails.
Sanyal says corporate India does not think about effective use of language “except the use of a language of evasion and obfuscation aimed at cheating/deception. The only bit of information that seems to generate a little interest is an account of how American and British corporate units have saved enormous amounts of time and money by switching to clarity in their forms.”
That “only bit” of information could launch gobbledygook-destroying agencies into being a thriving business, if they spread the basic realization that clear communication makes one’s personal and professional lives better, and clear communication needs cutting fluff and killing gobbledygook, from love letters to business quotations.
