Using Plain English

Why do we write and speak?

Usually, it's to communicate an idea to others. Often, it's to sound important and impress others. Sometimes, it's to deliberately obscure the truth and hide it from others.

Consider this typical paragraph from a contract for services: "Pre-authorized travel and reasonable out of pocket expenses incurred for analysis, reviews, delivery, project coordination and other tasks will be reimbursed at SUB-CONTRACTOR’S cost. Expenses submitted must conform to COMPANY’s expense policy guidelines. All expense claims and invoices must be submitted to the COMPANY Project Manager for approval prior to processing payment."

Now that's considered quite normal and easy language for a contract but is actually relatively complex English. Using the Flesch Reading Ease Scale, where 0 is very difficult to read and 100 is very easy, that paragraph ranks 16.7. That's actually quite tough and requires the equivalent of a college education, maybe even a law degree. If we really want to communicate the ideas, we could use much simpler language, perhaps something like the following that rates a very-easy 81.8, clear even to a kid in grade school:

"We will pay you back for travel costs that meet our rules. Our project manager needs to approve the costs before you get paid."
 
Small words and short sentences make language easy to understand. When we use long, convoluted sentences, and longer complicated words, it becomes harder and harder for people to get the meaning from what we're communicating. You can use this to your advantage if you don't sweat ethics and find yourself having to communicate something very awkward, uncomfortable or illegal.
 
As an example, can you figure out what this paragraph is really talking about?
 
"We have robust networks of strategic assets that we own or have contractual access to, which give us greater flexibility and speed to reliably deliver widespread logistical solutions...We have metamorphosed from an asset-based pipeline and power generating company to a marketing and logistics company whose biggest assets are its well-established business approach and its innovative people."
 

This is an excerpt from Lay and Skilling's final letter to shareholders in Enron's 2000 Annual Report. In Why business people speak like idiots, Fugere, Hardaway and Warshawsky use this and other examples to show that "If you have something to hide, it's not so shocking that evasive language would creep into your communications."
 
If you want to communicate, use short words and small sentences and learn to use Flesch and other tools to help keep it simple. If you want to impress people, stretch the words out luxuriously and endeavour to use a few more of them in each of your sentences. And, if you really want to speak without saying anything at all, consider utilitizing excessive non-brevity in your deliberate selection of linguistic patterns and multi-syllabic literary symbolism so as to intentionally but apparently innocently obfuscate the conceptual manifestations central to the paradigm upon which and about which you find yourself obligated to pontificate upon.