User:Throckmorton36/Sandbox/If Functions

Boilerplate and Gobbledygook
One of my peculiarities, which I must beg you to indulge if I am to retain my sanity (possibly at the expense of yours!) is an abhorrence of the artificial and hyper-legal language that is sometimes known as bureaucratese or gobbledygook.

The disease is almost universal, and the fight against it endless. But it is a fight worth making, and I ask your help in this struggle.

May I ask you, please, to try very hard to write Board orders and, even more so, drafts of letters for my signature, in straightforward, quasi-conversational, humane prose -- as though you are talking to or communicating with real people. I once asked a young lawyer who wanted us to say "we deem it inappropriate" to try that kind of language out on his children -- and if they did not drive him out of the room with their derisive laughter, to disown them.

I suggest the test is a good one: try reading some of the languages you use aloud, and ask yourself how your friends would be likely to react. (And then decide, on the basis of their reactions, whether you still want them as friends.)

I cannot possibly in a single communication give you more than a small fraction of the kinds of usages I have in mind. Here are just a few:

1. One of our recent show cause orders contained this language: "all interested persons be and they hereby are directed to show cause...." The underlined words are obviously redundant, as well as archaic.

2. Every time you are tempted to use "herein," "hereinabove," "hereinunder," or similarly, "therein" and its corresponding variants, try "here" or "there" or "above" or "below" and see if it doesn't make just as much sense.

3. The passive voice is wildly overused in government writing. Typically, its purpose is to conceal information: one is less likely to be jailed if one says "he was hit by a stone," than "I hit him with a stone." The active voice is far more forthright, direct, and human. (There are, of course, some circumstances in which the use of the passive is unavoidable; please try to confine it to those situations.)