A língua dos formulários (The language of forms)

The letter from my bank arrived on a Tuesday and I have now read it four times. It is nine lines long and it concerns, as far as I can establish, a fee of two euros. At no point does it say that anyone has taken two euros from me. The money is described as having been applied, which is the sort of thing that happens to paint. Nobody wrote that sentence in the way a person writes a sentence; it was assembled, like a shed, out of parts that were already lying around.

The note from the hospital belongs to the same family. It informs me that my appointment has been rescheduled and that I am advised to attend. Advised. Somewhere inside that word there is a small, well-oiled trapdoor: if I fail to turn up, it will emerge that I was advised, and that everything which follows is a matter between me and my own judgement. The word costs nothing to write and it moves the whole weight of the appointment onto the person least able to carry it.

The usual explanation for all this is that officials cannot write. I have come to doubt it. People who cannot write produce a different kind of mess: shorter, angrier, far easier to answer. What arrives from the bank is the work of someone who writes perfectly well and has been asked, discreetly, to write something else. Administrative language is not a failure. It is a considerable technical achievement in a field where success is measured by other criteria, and it does exactly what it was built to do.

What it does is move responsibility away from whoever is holding the pen. A clause stating that we may vary these terms is a small marvel of engineering: five words, one of which is the word may, and nobody in the building will ever be asked to justify a decision taken under it. None of this has gone unnoticed. The Plain English Campaign was founded in Britain in 1979 and announced itself by shredding official forms in a London square, and it still hands out prizes to the worst offenders. Nearly half a century later: the letter from my bank.

I would not say the campaign failed. It won every argument it ever entered, and that is precisely the difficulty. Nobody defends this way of writing. The people who produce it will agree with you, sincerely, that documents ought to be clearer, and then send you a paragraph explaining that in the event of non-receipt you should contact the relevant department at your earliest convenience. Clarity has no opponents. It simply has no budget, no deadline and nobody whose job depends on it. The two euros, incidentally, were mine.