Page 1 of
2 Let us make this perfectly
clear By Raja M
MUMBAI
- "Die, gobbledygook!" cry a Kolkata-based band of
language revolutionaries working to free English
from the intimidating, mind-strangling jargon,
officialese and legalese confusing our lives. They
work to persuade corporates, professionals and the
fellow on the road to a life made simpler with
straightforward communication.
"Clear
English is good for your business," these language
doctors say, quoting cases such as General
Electric saving US$275,000
by
redrafting its user manuals in plain English and a
Hong Kong study finding that a financial-services
company lost about HK$2,685,600 (US$345,640) a
year through senior staff wasting 30 minutes a day
editing their colleagues' work.
Working
with the UK-based Plain English worldwide
movement, Clear English India has held successful
workshops with ICICI, India's largest
non-government-owned bank, and offers workshops
for information-technology professionals,
companies, business people, bureaucrats, lawyers
and teachers. Every simplified document that a
corporate client sends out earns a "Clear English
India" stamp.
A pioneering initiative of
media veterans Jyoti Sanyal and Ajoy John, this
language-clarity movement looms as an idea of the
"why didn't we think of it before" kind. Sanyal,
author of the The Statesman Style Book,
told Asia Times Online that he was moved to start
the project because of "dismay that built up
within me through 30 years of editing reporters'
garbage as a sub-editor in an English-language
newspaper, readers' eager response", and "the
rather ambitious desire to rewrite in plain
language such provisions of Indian law as all
citizens most need to know". Sanyal, 61, tied up
with Martin Cutts, who launched the plain-language
movement in the United Kingdom.
The
Derbyshire-based UK Plain Language Commission, a
non-governmental business entity, works with a
wide array of organizations including government
departments, financial-services companies,
corporates, local-governance bodies and
international law firms.
On the Clear
English India website is a "decoded" version of
India's important Right to Information Act that
was passed last year empowering
red-tape-tyrannized citizens to copy official
documents, question the government and inspect
files. A sample of gobbledygook killed:
Where access to the record or a part
thereof is required to be provided under this
Act and the person to whom access is to be
provided is sensorily disabled, the Central
Public Information Officer or State Public
Information Officer, as the case may be, shall
provide assistance to enable access to the
information, including providing such assistance
as may be appropriate for the
inspection.
Jyoti Sanyal translated
this 65-word mind-bender to: "If a physically
challenged person seeks information under this
Act, the Central or State Public Information
Officer must help him or her access the
information."
Clear English India's
anti-gobbledygook weapons involve using common,
everyday words (instead of language relics such as
"hereinafter", "heretofore" etc) except for
necessary technical terms, use of "you" and other
pronouns, using active voice, and using short
sentences.
"Mindsets are hard to change,"
said Ajoy John, who worked editorially with
leading publications in Kolkata before
establishing his own design and media agency, Bee
iDeas. "People love the bullshit, such as using
'Siamese twins' like 'null and void', 'terms and
conditions' - both words mean the same."
He said the communication diseases were
inherited from India's colonial past and earlier
practices in Britain such as paying lawyers for
the number of words they used in legal documents.
"Governments, businesses and service providers
need to communicate to the common man in a
language they understand, and not have them run to
someone else to explain what it's about. That's
unfair."
Not surprisingly, Clear English
India found the biggest resistance came from
lawyers of its corporate clients. "They told us if
simple language is used loopholes would creep in,"
said Ajoy. "But when we simplified their legal
documents and asked them to point out legal
loopholes, they couldn't."
He narrated how
a young lawyer told him that 100-page plaints that
judges get bombarded with from lawyers can be
reduced to
