A welcome surprise

I recently received new policy documents for my car insurance. It was great to see this note attached.

We have simplified our policy wording and made it easier for you to find the information you need. We have also explained our benefits and some of the insurance terms we use in more detail so that your car insurance policy is easier to understand.

Good work AA!

Read the policy document (PDF download, 1.2MB)

Clarity... and the words you can't say out loud

There are loads of very precise words around, but we can’t always use them. Clarity is the goal. It’s no use looking like an expert with your technical terminology if your audience doesn’t understand what you’re saying.

See the post from Johnson that got us thinking about this.

There’s a word for it — but you can’t use it

When it comes to creative writing, know the rules of writing before you break them

Do the rules of good writing apply to creative writing? Surely creative writing is the complete opposite of information writing, with its focus on structure and clarity? 

In some ways, that’s true. When it comes to creativity, anything goes. The only real criterion of successful creative writing is whether anyone wants to read it. Does it work for the reader? If you can attract readers to your page of ungrammatical blank verse, good for you.

It’s the same in any art form. Who hasn’t looked at a famous piece of modern art, with a minimal painted squiggle or primitive-looking blobs of colour, and thought ‘my 3-year-old could draw that’?

Be careful. A good artist or writer really knows their craft. They know how to reduce complex ideas into something that seems deceptively simple. Simplicity in writing is hard to do well, because it often distils many ideas down to their essence. To do that, you have to understand the rules of writing. Once you know the rules, you can be free to break them—but it should be a conscious choice.

I came upon a useful explanation of how and why rules apply to creative writing in an interview Script Magazine did with Joseph McBride, a well known screenwriter in the United States. McBride teaches screenwriting at San Francisco State University, and has written successfully for film and television.

Here’s what he said:

‘Even though, in an important sense, creative writing doesn’t have ‘rules,’ writing without any knowledge of the rules of good English prose, the rules of grammar and sentence structure, is a guarantee of muddled, messy writing. There’s a frequent misconception among students that it’s not ‘creative’ to learn the rules of good writing. Those students’ writing is often merely free-form indulgence. Discipline is essential to any genuinely creative writing. You have to know what you are doing and where you are going. Otherwise it’s just scattershot, and the story falls apart on the page. If you can’t write grammatically correct prose, your writing will lack clarity, and the reader will become exasperated in trying to follow or figure out what you might be trying to say. My screenwriter friend Sam Hamm says the first job of a screenwriter is ‘to keep the reader’s eye moving down the page.’

Well said, Joseph. Any good writing, creative or not, has to meet the needs of its reader, or they simply won’t read it. And then all that creativity goes to waste.

Trespassing — grammar with a legal implication

Our Margaret Austin noted a crime against language on the front page our newspaper the other day. Its story ‘Dirty Tactics in Grocery War’ contains the following misuse of the verb to trespass:

‘He trespassed two people yesterday’. 

The grammar stuff

‘Trespass’ is an intransitive verb meaning ‘to commit a trespass’— and an intransitive verb cannot have an object.

You cannot trespass someone from your supermarket. You can issue a trespass notice against them entering your supermarket — and if they set foot inside it, you’d say they were trespassing your property. But if you want them to stay outside, you cannot ‘trespass them’.

Legal implications

A similar crime was committed by journalists who said that Stuart Wilson had been trespassed from the Whanganui’s public spaces. You can’t trespass anyone from anything either.

Margaret notes that, if Wilson’s lawyer decided to take a grammatical stand in the debate about where his client is and is not allowed in Whanganui, Wilson could win freedom of movement in the city’s parks and domains.

Bouquets to the good; brickbats to the bad

Have you entered the 2012 WriteMark New Zealand Plain English Awards? Enter for your own organisation, or put some other organisation under the spotlight. Let us see the best, and the worst.

Entries close on 21 September, so don't miss out!

The annual Awards honour the organisations and people who are trying to make the world a better place by banishing jargon and gobbledygook.With consumers increasingly demanding clear communication, the Awards celebrate the efforts of government and business organisations that have made a commitment to plain English.

Nominate another organisation in one of the People’s Choice categories. The Best Plain English Communication category recognises a document or website that exemplifies plain English. And because a bit of adverse publicity can inspire change too, the Worst ‘Brainstrain’ Award invites you to ‘dob in’ your most confusing, jargon-filled document or website.

This year sees the addition of the Best Plain English Turnaround Award where previous nominees for the "Brainstrain’ Award can redeem themselves.

The award categories are:

• Plain English Champion Best Organisation Best Individual or Team
• Best Plain English Document Public Sector Private Sector
• Best Plain English Website Public Sector Private Sector
• Best Plain English Sentence Transformation
• Best Plain English Technical Communicator
• Best Plain English Investor Document
• People's Choice Best Plain English Communication Worst 'Brainstrain' Communication
• Best Plain English Turnaround

Entries will be assessed by an international panel of plain English experts and advocates.

The finalists in each of the award categories will also be recognised with an Award of Distinction. Winners will be announced at an Awards ceremony in Wellington on 29 November.

For more information or to enter online, visit www.plainenglishawards.org.nz

Now here is the news ... a myriad of innovations from the world of journalese

Firemen battled to control a blaze, lashed by high winds and torrential rain. Investigators will later hone in on the cause of the flare-up. Their thinking has undergone a seismic shift about the likely cause of the massive explosions that rocked the surrounding area.

And company and union representatives negotiated long into the night, hammering out an agreement on pay and conditions in a bid to stall closure of the plant. The midnight deal may still be thrown out by workers who are in an ugly mood following threats of slashes to their overtime. The closure of the factory would be disastrous for the close-knit, isolated community, and it has the capability to decimate the town.

And a Minister is in a serious but stable condition, and is expected to make a full recovery after the smash in a black spot on State Highway One when his car went out of control after he fell asleep at the wheel.

Meanwhile the divorce of two high-profile sports stars that began as an amicable split has turned sour and is now an acrimonious tug-of-war over their amassed fortune and their luxury, architecturally designed clifftop mansion.

You’ll enjoy this simple dinner that’s quick and easy to prepare from pantry ingredients that are hearty and economical, and full of the fabulous taste of Italy.

Finally, a video of a three-legged dog that’s made friends with pet sheep and its lamb and shared a scoff of fish and chips has become a YouTube sensation, with over 3 million views world-wide. Farmer Doug Field says he’s blown away by the response. ‘They’ve been mates for years, they’re just part of the family.’

And a Commission of Inquiry will launch an investigation into the cause of this uninterrupted series of (linguistic) tragedies.


Understanding, respect, and the role of good writing
We hear these words every day. They relate to real events in the lives of real people.

If we talk about those people in clichés and misuse the meanings of words we use to describe them,  do we relate to those people, and respect the difficulty of their situations?

Find some other way
If you are journalist (as I was) and you read this blog, give it some thought. You’re working under pressure so it’s easy to turn to habit. But with a little inspiration from other sources, you can find alternative words.

Two places to look are:

Words journalists use that people never say
(You’ll find suggestions for alternatives to the clichés at the end of the page)

The BBC Style Guide

Comma corruption starts early

There’s an outrage in my son's reading book.

'I am going to get some nuts, today,' said Mother Bear. (Beverley Randell. Baby Bear Climbs a Tree: Story Books Level 9, p4.)

That comma after 'nuts' is completely unnecessary. It's not a serial comma. It's not a comma between clauses. It's just plain wrong.

They're already filling my son’s head with dangerous nonsense, poor mite, and he's only in Year 1. We were doing our reading at home last night, and when he got to 'nuts' he gravely told me, 'I've got to take a breath now.'

Passed between generations
This travesty is being passed from one generation to another. I remember as if it were yesterday. I was in Primer 1, and kind Mrs Purdey was teaching us about punctuation. 'Put a comma wherever you want to take a breath,' she said.

Some of us breathe more often than others, and Beverley Randell must have been for a jog before she wrote about Mother Bear. Commas are there to separate clauses, to separate introductory phrases, and to separate items in a list. And that's it.

A nail in the coffin
Put commas elsewhere, and there you have it - the rot sets in: another nail in the coffin of correct punctuation in the 21st century. The correctly used comma will go the way of the apostrophe.

And he’s only age five! It's a tragedy.

(PS: Aside from the comma, this is one of the nicest books my son has brought home. Grammar isn’t everything! We just don’t want it to get in the way of a good story.)