Thursday, May 19, 2011

This is Funny! Government Will Start Writing Plain English?

SEE HERE When I was first working for the government and writing my first report, one of the senior civil servants took me under his wing and explained the rules for writing a properly bureaucratic report. Such things as never referring to a person and writing a lot in the passive tense since if you used the active tense then who but a person would be the subject, all these were the order of the day. So if we had developed something it was written as: "The frabblewitzer, a new technology for fritzing, was developed by the fritzing development group." You couldn't say anything like: "John Smith experimenting with new fritzing technology developed a method he coined the frabblewitzer." Couldn't have that. It will be interesting to see if all of this does anything at all.

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