Plain reading

First published in Column 8 on the 6^th April, 1994

I’ve recently been looking into the area of accelerated education. One of the latest books on the New Zealand scene is The Learning Revolution, by New Zealander Gordon Dryden and American Dr Jeannette Vos.

Much of the book enthuses me for the whole idea of accelerated education, but I find one of their statements a little difficult to take on board. It goes as follows, ‘If you can read a newspaper in an hour, you already know how to read at least four books a day.’

Well, I can read some newspapers in a quarter of an hour – or less – and gain as much as I’m likely to, but other newspapers and magazines take a bit more of my time.

This isn’t because I’m any sluggard when it comes to reading. I believe it’s because some writers won’t write plain English.

Dryden and Vos do say in their book that much non-fiction writing is thick, cluttery and not user-friendly. They’re talking about medical jargon at that stage. Medical jargon hasn’t got this on its own; another field of writing is so jargon-filled you have to be in the know to decipher it.

I’m talking about computerese. Before I go on, let me say that some computer magazines make great efforts to be intelligible. Many don’t.

My discovery of the week came in a computer magazine which had a right-hand page headline boldly announcing, ‘Survey Results Call For Plain Speaking.’ Two paragraphs down the writer says, ‘The overwhelming finding was that large scale buyers of computer software have tired of buzzwords and glitzy marketing terminology.’

Never a truer word. But what do we find on the opposite page? (I’ve substituted Buzz for the real names, by the way.)

‘Buzz’s suite of client tools includes 3GLs (Buzz C++v4.0 and Buzz Pascal) for the most complex mission critical applications, to 4GLs (Buzz and Buzz) for business critical, departmental applications, to decision support tools (Buzz) for analysing data.’

This is plain speaking?

Further down we try to read, ‘Application modules will eventually break down into more manageable “function objects” which provide the flexibility to support rapidly changing process oriented and matrix organisations.’

Buzz embeds ‘OOP philosophy’ (should that be oops?). It upsizes ‘client/server and workgroup capabilities.’

Now I can figure that out if I want, but I could hardly speed-read it and make any sense of it.

This magazine wasn’t alone in its incomprehensibility. Try this piece of front page news: ‘An enhanced transmission control protocol/internet protocol stack will support technology for centrally configuring Buzz NT clients and server on enterprise networks and tracking their IP addresses.’

I know the saying, if you can’t stand the heat, don’t go in the kitchen. If I can’t read computerese, don’t buy the magazines. However, when it comes to words (at least), I’m ever willing to learn, and I do have a fair understanding of a variety of jargons. But why do I have to work so hard to makes sense of someone’s words?

In the book Kiwi Journalist Jim Tucker says journalists face the problem of dealing with complex communication styles, ‘from politicians, scientists, lawyers, bureaucrats, medics, academics and the literati’ – and the computerati. Journalists are supposed to be able to translate jargon, and ‘eliminate barriers to comprehension.’

Tucker goes on to say that journalists writing for the famed Wall Street Journal are supposed to ensure a child of eleven can read their news stories. Plainly – or should that be unplainly? – neither of the magazines I’ve quoted from have such rule of thumb.

In-house journals have a right, I suppose, to use in-house words. I believe, however, both these magazines are intended for a more general reader. And if this well-past-eleven general reader finds their writing difficult to manage, I think they’ve lost their public.

 

Jeannette Vos
Photo courtesy of LinkedIn

 This was one of those columns that started off in one corner and somehow wound up in another. Never mind.

It’s less difficult to read the computerese mentioned above now than it must have been in 1994. While I don’t immediately understand the quoted text I can get the gist of from the accumulated experience of the last thirty-plus years. Journalism, meanwhile, has gone well down the tubes. There are still journalists who can write, and write clearly. But many of those who write in newspapers these days appear to have been expected to produce stories at the speed of light – and consequently make a hash of them. Time after time in the ODT, to name just one paper, we have a news item that tells us the story, then repeats it again (sometimes word for word) a few paragraphs later, while the rest is filled with filler. A person related to the story suddenly appears out of nowhere with no introduction. And ‘quotes’ frequently now consist of words starting with f or c with a long dash behind them. The necessity for including swear words is beyond me. It adds nothing to the quote, except perhaps to say that the person being quoted said very little, and so a bit of ‘colour’ is included. And perhaps worse still are the quotes from ‘a witness who declined to give their name’ – usually these consist of little more than…’I heard a noise.’ Or, ‘This is a nice neighbourhood. These sorts of things don’t happen round here.’

Enough griping.  

Jeannette Vos is still going strong on accelerated education, under different names: high-performance learning method; accelerating our innate self-learning abilities, etc.

Jim Tucker is alive and well and writing news columns on his own blog.

I checked out the Wall Street Journal on behalf of its eleven-year-old readers. Yup, it’s certainly clearer than many magazines/papers, though I suspect most of the subject matter is above the interest level of an average eleven-year-old. Nevertheless the paper doesn’t dumb down its language either.