III

The Elements

This then is Style … essentially it resembles good manners. It comes of endeavouring to understand others, of thinking for them rather than yourself—of thinking, that is, with the heart as well as the head … So, says Fénelon … ‘your words will be fewer and more effectual; and while you make less ado, what you do will be more profitable’.

QUILLER-COUCH, On the Art of Writing, 1916

Having thus cleared the decks, we can return to the various other purposes for which official writing has to be used. In the past it consisted mostly of departmental minutes and instructions, interdepartmental correspondence, and despatches to governors and ambassadors. These things still have their places, but in volume they must have been left far behind by the vast output now necessary for explaining the law to the public. An immense quantity of modern social legislation and innumerable statutory controls have been necessitated by the war and its consequences. Yet members of the public are still supposed to know the law without being told, and ignorance is no excuse for breaking it. That was all very well in the days when ordinary citizens had little more concern with the law than an obligation to avoid committing the crimes prohibited by the Ten Commandments; no niceties needed explaining to them then. Today, however, our daily lives are conditioned by an infinity of statutory rights and obligations. Even if the laws that define them were short, simple and intelligible, the number of these laws alone would prevent most people from discovering by their own study what they all were.

The official must be the interpreter. Now this is a task as delicate as it is difficult. An official interpreting the law is looked on with suspicion. It is for the legislature to make the laws, for the executive to administer them, and for the judiciary to interpret them. The official must avoid all appearance of encroaching on the province of the Courts. For this reason it used to be a rule in the Civil Service that when laws were brought to the notice of those affected by them, the actual words of the statute must be used. In no other way could officials be sure of escaping all imputation of putting their own interpretation on the law. Here, then, we have a dilemma. If the official is tied to the words of the law, and if, as we have seen, the words of the law in order to be precise are less than readily intelligible, how is the ordinary person to be helped to understand it?

No doubt much can be done by selection and arrangement, even though the words used are those of the Act. But the official finds it more and more difficult to give helpful explanations other than by departing from them. And something even more than that is needed to carry out the exhortation given by a President of the Board of Trade to his staff: ‘Let us get away entirely from the chilly formalities of the old-style correspondence which seemed to come from some granite monolith rather than from another human being’. The old rule is indeed yielding to the pressure of events. A new technique is being developed for those pamphlets and leaflets that are necessary to explain the law to the public in such matters as PAYE and National Insurance. Its guiding principles are to use the simplest language and avoid technical terms; to employ the second person freely; not to try to give all the details of the law relevant to the subject but to be content with stating the essentials; to explain, if these are stated in the writer’s words and not the words of the Act, that they are an approximation only; to tell members of the public where they can find fuller information and further advice; and always to make sure that people know their rights of appeal. This technique is being closely studied, in the departments concerned, by experts who have nothing to learn from me.

But there is another part of this subject: the answering of letters from correspondents about their own cases. These answers cannot be written, like pamphlets and leaflets, by people who are experts both in the subject matter and in English composition, and here I shall have some advice to give. A letter of this kind needs in some respects a special technique, but the principles of this technique are the same as those of all good writing, whatever its purpose. We have here in its most elementary form—though not on that account its least difficult—the problem of writing what one means and affecting one’s reader precisely as one wishes. If therefore we begin our study of the problem of official English by examining the technique of this part of it, that will serve as a good introduction to the rest of the book, for it will bring out most of the points that we shall have to study more closely later. It is in this field of an official’s duties more than any other that good English can be defined simply as English that is readily understood by the reader. To be clear is to be efficient. To be obscure is to be inefficient. Your style of letter-writing is to be judged not by literary conventions or grammatical niceties but by whether it carries out efficiently the job you have been paid to do.

This ‘efficiency’ must be broadly interpreted. It connotes a proper attitude of mind towards your correspondents. They may not care about being addressed in literary English, but they will care very much about being treated with sympathy and understanding. It is not easy nowadays to remember anything so contrary to all appearances as that officials are the servants of the public; but they are, and no official should foster the illusion that it is the other way round. So your style must not only be simple, but also friendly, sympathetic and natural, appropriate to one who is a servant, not a master.

Let us now translate these generalities into some practical rules.

(1) Be sure you know what your correspondent is asking before you begin to draft your reply. Study the letter in front of you carefully. If the writing is obscure, spare no trouble in trying to get at its meaning. If you conclude that the person who wrote it meant something different from what is actually on the page (as it may well prove) address yourself to the meaning and not to the words, and do not be clever at your correspondent’s expense. Adapt the atmosphere of your reply to suit that of the letter you have received. If its tone is troubled, be sympathetic. If it is rude, be especially courteous. If it is muddle-headed, be especially lucid. If it is stubborn, be patient. If your correspondent is helpful, be appreciative. If you find yourself convicted of a mistake, acknowledge it freely and even with gratitude. And never let the flavour of the patronising creep in as it did into this letter received by a passenger who had lost a railway ticket:

In the circumstances you have now explained, and the favourable enquiries made by me, I agree as a special case and without prejudice not to press for payment of the demand sent you … and you may consider the matter closed. I would however suggest that in future you should take greater care of your railway ticket to obviate any similar occurrence.

Follow the admirable advice given in an instruction by the Board of Inland Revenue to their staff, ‘that we should try to put ourselves in the position of our correspondent’, for then we ‘shall speedily detect how unconvincing our letters can seem, or how much we may be taking for granted’.

(2) Begin by answering the question. Do not start by examining relevant law and practice, only gradually leading up to a statement that explains how this applies to the case in hand. By doing so you keep your correspondent on tenterhooks and risk causing such befuddlement that your answer is lost. Give the answer briefly and clearly at the outset, and only then, if explanation is needed, begin your explanation. Thus your correspondent will know the worst, or the best, at once, and can choose whether or not to skip the explanation.

(3) So far as possible, confine yourself to the facts of the case you are writing about, and avoid any general statement about the law. If you do make statements about the law, you are likely to face this dilemma: that if you want to be strictly accurate you will have to use technical terms and legal diction that your correspondent will not understand, yet if you want to be simple and intelligible you will have to qualify your statement so copiously with hedging phrases like normally, ordinarily, in most cases and with some exceptions, that you will give the impression of keeping something up your sleeve and not being frank in what you say.

(4) Avoid a formal framework, if you can. This is a difficult subject, and those who supervise correspondence of this kind are still groping for a satisfactory standard practice. How are we to ‘get away from the chilly formalities of the old style’?

Over the years when the ‘old style’ became set, official correspondence consisted mostly of interdepartmental communications. The stock formalities in these letters served as reminders that, for present purposes, both the official who wrote a letter and the official who received it were in themselves things of naught; they merely formed a conduit along which the thoughts of their political chiefs might be exchanged. It is no doubt proper that officials and the public should be reminded at all turns that ministerial responsibility is the keystone of our democracy. But however appropriate a formal style may still be in certain circumstances, it will not do for the sort of letter we are now concerned with. It is too flagrantly unreal, besides militating against the spirit of friendliness that we have seen to be desirable.

There are two difficulties. One is how to start. The other is to whom to attribute the sentiments, opinions and decisions that the letter contains. As to the first, everyone’s inclination is to follow tradition at least to the point of beginning with In reply to your letter of, or With reference to your letter of. That brings us to our first difficulty: how are we to go on?

In detail the possibilities are infinite, but the main forms are few. ‘I have (or “I am”) to inform you’ used to be the most common. But it is unsatisfactory, not to say silly, with its mysterious suggestion of some compulsion working undisclosed in the background. ‘I beg to inform you’ will not do. ‘In reply to your letter … I wish to inform you’ (which I have seen) is crushingly stiff. This is almost like saying I would have you know. The passive ‘you are informed’ has an aloofness that ought to rule it out. There is the device of plunging straight into saying what you have to say without any introductory words. But this will not do as a continuation of In reply to your letter. What is in reply to the letter is not the information but the giving of it. (It is nonsense to say, ‘In reply to your letter of (date), the income tax law on personal allowances has been changed’.) I regret to inform you and I am glad to inform you will do nicely when there is anything to be glad or sorry about, but that will not always be the case.

Must we then conclude that we ought to abandon the standard opening In reply to your letter unless we find we can continue naturally with I am glad to tell you, or I am sorry to have to tell you, or some such phrase? Perhaps. Nothing would be lost, and there are plenty of other ways of beginning that will not lead us into this mire. But if we turn versions of In reply to your letter into a full sentence we shake off our difficulties.

This must be done with discretion. Some attempts are unfortunate. For instance:

Your letter is acknowledged, and the following would appear to be the position.

Receipt of your letter is acknowledged. It is pointed out …

Here is the inhuman passive. A better way of saying what these two were trying to say is ‘Thank you for your letter. The position is (or the facts are) as follows …’. Or again, in this example,

With reference to your claim. I have to advise you that before the same is dealt with …

there is no need to start with an ejaculatory and verbless clause. All that was needed was to begin: ‘Before I can deal with your claim’. I believe that a common formula during the war was:

Your letter of (date) about so-and-so. We really cannot see our way …

I am told that this is fortunately dying out, perhaps because it is becoming less difficult to see our way. Another not very happy effort is:

I refer to recent correspondence and to the form which you have completed …

There is a faint air of bombast to this: it vaguely recalls Pistol’s way of talking (‘I speak of Africa and golden joys’). Probably ‘Thank you for the completed form’ would have been an adequate opening.

There are, however, many possible ways to do the job of In reply to your letter or With reference to your letter that make a complete sentence without getting the writer into trouble.

Thank you for your letter of (date).

I have received your letter of (date).

I am writing to you in reply to your letter of (date).

You wrote to me on such-and-such a subject.

I have looked into the question of such-and-such, about which you wrote to me.

All enable you to continue by saying what you have to say as a direct statement, with no unfriendly preliminaries like I would inform you.

There remains the second question. To whom are you to attribute the opinions and decisions which, having got over the initial hurdle, you then proceed to deliver? There are four possibilities. To illustrate them, let us take what must today be a common type of letter, one turning down an application. The first of them is that the letter should be written in the first person, and that the official who signs it should boldly accept responsibility:

I have considered your application and do not think you have made out a case.

The second is that responsibility should be spread by the use of the first person plural:

We have considered your application and do not think you have made out a case.

The third is that it should be further diluted by attributing decisions and opinions to ‘the Department’:

The Department has (or have) considered your application and does (or do) not think you have made out a case.*

The fourth is that responsibility should be assigned to a quarter mystically remote by the use throughout of the impersonal passive:

Your application has been considered and it is not thought that you have made out a case.

This is neither sympathetic nor natural.

I cannot pretend to be an authoritative guide on the comparative merits of all of these approaches (no doubt every department makes its own rules), but there are three further points that seem to me important.

First, in letters written in the first person be careful to avoid giving the impression that you are an all-powerful individual signifying your pleasure. If the letter grants what is asked for, do not say that you are making a ‘concession’. If it refuses a request never say, as in the example given, I do not think you have made out a case. You should imply no more than that it is your duty to decide how the case before you fits into the instructions under which you work.

Second, it is a mistake to mix these methods in one letter unless there is good reason for it. If you choose an impersonal method, such as ‘the Department’, you may of course need to introduce the first person in order to say something like ‘I am glad to tell you that the Department has …’. But do not mix the methods merely for variety, saying I in the first paragraph, we in the second, the Department in the third and it is in the fourth. Choose one and stick to it.

Third, do not use the impersonal passive at all—with its formal unsympathetic phrases, it is felt, it is regretted, it is appreciated and so on—otherwise you will seem to your correspondent more like a robot than a human being. How feeble this sentence is: ‘It is thought you will now have received the form of agreement’, compared with: ‘I expect that by now you will have received the form of agreement’.

(5) Be careful to say nothing that might give the impression, however mistakenly, that you think it right that your correspondent should be put to trouble in order to save you from it. Do not ask for information a second time that you have asked for and been given already unless there is some good reason for doing so; and if there is, explain the reason. Otherwise you will make it seem as though you think it proper that your correspondent should have to do what is perhaps quite a lot of work to save you the effort of turning up a back file. Do not use the phrase Date as postmark. This will be read by many recipients as meaning: ‘I am much too important and busy a person to remember what the date is or to put it down if I did. So if you want to know you must pick the envelope out of the wastepaper basket, if you can find it, and read the date on the postmark, if you can decipher it. It is better that you should do this than that I should be delayed in my work for even a moment’.

Note. The phrase Date as postmark may be less popular now than it was when Gowers wrote this, but it does survive in bureaucratic writing, especially on printed matter destined to be posted without a covering letter. ~

(6) Use no more words than are necessary to do the job. Superfluous words waste your time, waste official paper, tire your reader and obscure your meaning. There is no need, for instance, to begin each paragraph with a phrase like I am further to point out, I would also add, or you will moreover observe. Go straight to what you have to say without striking a precautionary note, and then say it in as few words as are needed to make your meaning plain.

(7) Keep your sentences short. This will help you to think clearly and will help your correspondent to take your meaning. If you find you have slipped into long sentences, split them up. This sentence is a long one:

If he was not insured on reaching the age of 65 he does not become insured by reason of any insurable employment which he takes up later, and the special contributions which are payable under the Act by his employer only, in respect of such employment, do not give him title to any health benefits or pension, and moreover a man is not at liberty to pay any contributions on his own account as a voluntary contributor for any period after his 65th birthday.

This sentence contains three statements of fact linked by the conjunction and. Because this is its form, no reader can be quite sure until reading beyond the ands whether any of these statements has been completed. Only in re-reading the sentence will many people pick up the statements one by one. If they had been separated by full stops (after later and pension) and the and s omitted, each statement could have been grasped at first reading. The full stops would have seemed to say: ‘Have you got that? Very well, now I’ll tell you something else’.

(8) Be compact. Do not put a strain on your reader’s memory by widely separating parts of a sentence that are closely related to one another. Why, for instance, is this sentence difficult to grasp on first reading?

A deduction of tax may be claimed in respect of any person whom the individual maintains at his own expense, and who is (i) a relative of his, or of his wife, and incapacitated by old age or infirmity from maintaining himself or herself, or (ii) his or his wife’s widowed mother, whether incapacitated or not, or (iii) his daughter who is resident with him and upon whose services he is compelled to depend by reason of old age or infirmity.

The structure of the sentence is too diffuse. The reader has to keep in mind the opening words all the way through. The last point explained is that a deduction of tax may be claimed ‘in respect of any person whom the individual maintains at his own expense and who is his daughter’, but his daughter is separated from who is by no fewer than thirty-two words. In a later leaflet of income tax instructions, the same sentence was rewritten to run as follows:

If you maintain a relative of yourself or your wife who is unable to work because of old age or infirmity, you can claim an allowance of … You can claim this allowance if you maintain your widowed mother, or your wife’s widowed mother, whether she is unable to work or not. If you maintain a daughter who lives with you because you or your wife are old or infirm, you can claim an allowance of …

Why is the new version so much easier to grasp than the old? Partly it is because a sentence of eighty-one words has been split into three, each making a statement complete in itself. But it is also because a device has been employed that is a most useful one when an official has to say, as an official so often must, that such-and-such a class of people who have such-and-such attributes, and perhaps such-and-such other attributes, have such-and-such rights or obligations. The device is to say: if you belong to such-and-such a class of people, and if you have such-and-such attributes, you have such-and-such a right or obligation (that is, the device is to use conditional clauses in the second person instead of relative clauses in the third). The advantage of this is that it avoids the wide separation of the main verb from the main subject. The subject you comes immediately next to the verb it governs, and in this way you announce unmistakably to your reader: ‘I have finished describing the class of people about whom I have to tell you something, and I shall now say what that something is’.

(9) Do not say more than is necessary. The feeling that prompts you to tell your correspondent everything when you give an explanation is commendable, but you will often be of more help if you resist it, and confine yourself to the facts that make clear what has happened.

I regret however that the Survey Officer who is responsible for the preliminary investigation as to the technical possibility of installing a telephone at the address quoted by any applicant has reported that owing to a shortage of a spare pair of wires to the underground cable (a pair of wires leading from the point near your house right back to the local exchange and thus a pair of wires essential for the provision of service for you) is lacking and that therefore it is a technical impossibility to install a telephone for you at …

This explanation is obscure partly because the sentence is too long, partly because the long parenthesis has thrown the grammar out of gear, and partly because the writer, with the best of intentions, says far more than is necessary even to make what is said here seem thoroughly polite and convincing. It might have run thus:

I am sorry to have to tell you that we have found that there is no spare pair of wires on the cable that would have to be used to connect your house with the exchange. I fear, therefore, that it is impossible to install a telephone for you.

(10) Explain technical terms in simple words. You will soon become so familiar with the technical terms of the law you are administering that you will feel that you have known them all your life, and may forget that to others they are unintelligible. Of this fault I can find no English example to equal the American one already quoted:

The non-compensable evaluation heretofore assigned to you for your service-connected disability is confirmed and continued.

This means, I understand, that the veteran to whom it is addressed has been judged to be still not entitled to a disability pension.

I am indebted for the following example to a friend in the Board of Inland Revenue, who also supplies the comment:

I have pleasure in enclosing a cheque for £ …, a supplementary repayment for … This is accounted for by the fact that in calculating the untaxed interest assessable the interest on the loan from Mr X was treated as untaxed, whereas it should be regarded as received in full out of taxed sources—any liability thereon being fully satisfied. The treatment of this loan interest from the date of the first payment has been correct—i.e. tax charged at full standard rate on Mr X and treated in your hands as a liability fully satisfied before receipt.

‘The occasion was the issue of an unexpected cheque,’ writes my friend. ‘It is a difficult matter to explain, and an honest attempt has been made. The major fault is one of over-explanation in technical language. The writer could have said:

The interest you received from Mr X on the money you lent him was included as part of your income to be taxed. This was wrong. Mr X had already paid tax on this interest, and you are not liable to pay it again. You have been repaid all the tax due to you.

With this the recipient would have been satisfied. “Treated in your hands as a liability” is an odd way of describing an asset, and the loan was of course to Mr X, not from him. “Interest-on-the-loan” is treated confusingly as a composite noun.’

(11) Do not use what have been called the ‘dry meaningless formulae’ of commercialese. Not all of them need warning against: officials do not write your esteemed favour to hand or address their correspondents as your good self. But some of these formulae do occasionally appear. Same is used as a pronoun,* enclosed please find is written instead of I enclose, and foolish begs are common. The use of beg in commercialese is presumably to be accounted for by a false analogy with the reasonable use of I beg as a polite way of introducing a contradiction, I beg to differ meaning ‘I beg your leave to differ’. But there is no reason why one should apologise, however faintly, for acknowledging a letter or remaining an obedient servant.

Avoid, too, that ugly and unnecessary symbol and/or when writing letters. It is fit only for forms and lists and specifications and things of that sort. It can always be dispensed with. Instead of writing (say) ‘soldiers and/or sailors’ we can write ‘soldiers or sailors or both’.

Note. And/or is not fit even for ‘specifications and things of that sort’ unless used with care. When it is thrown into the middle of the confounding phrase ‘regardless … or not’ it becomes positively boggling, as the Department for Communities and Local Government demonstrates in one of its attempts to explain current planning law to the public:

With all building work, the owner of the property (or land) in question is ultimately responsible for complying with the relevant planning rules and building regulations (regardless of the need to apply for planning permission and/or building regulations approval or not). ~

Do not allow per to get too free with the English language. Such convenient abbreviations as mph and rpm are no doubt with us for good. But generally it is well to confine per to its own language, e.g. per cent, per capita, per contra, and to avoid writing ‘as per my letter’ for ‘as I said in my letter’. Even for phrases in which per is linked to a Latin word, there are often English equivalents that serve at least as well, and possibly better. ‘£100 a year’ is more natural than ‘£100 per annum’, and per se does not ordinarily mean anything more than ‘by itself’ or ‘in itself’. Another Latin word better left alone is re. This is the ablative case of the Latin word res. It means ‘in the matter of’. It is used by lawyers for the title of lawsuits, such as ‘In re John Doe deceased’, and has passed into commercialese as an equivalent of the English preposition about. It has no business there, or in official writing. It is not needed either in a heading (‘re your application for a permit’), which can stand without its support, or in the body of a letter, where an honest about will serve your purpose better.

A correspondent has sent me the following example of the baleful influence of commercialese:

Payment of the above account, which is now overdue at the date hereof, appears to have been overlooked, and I shall be glad to have your remittance by return of post, and oblige.

Yours faithfully,

The superfluous at the date hereof must have been prompted by a feeling that now by itself was not formal enough and needed dressing up. And the word oblige is grammatically mid-air. It has no subject, and is firmly cut off by a full stop from what might have been supposed to be its object, the writer’s signature.

The fault of commercialese is that its mechanical use has a bad effect on both writer and reader—the writer’s appreciation of the meaning of words is deadened, and the reader feels that the writer’s approach lacks sincerity.

(12) Use words with precise meanings rather than vague ones. As we have seen, you will not be doing your job properly unless you make your meaning readily understood: this is an elementary duty. Yet habitual disregard of it is the commonest cause of the abuse and raillery directed against what is called officialese. All entrants into the Civil Service come equipped with a vocabulary of common words of precise meaning adequate for every ordinary purpose. But when the moment arrives for them to write as officials, most have a queer trick of forgetting these words and relying mainly on a smaller vocabulary of less common words with a less precise meaning. It is a curious fact that in the official’s armoury of words the weapons readiest to hand are weapons not of precision but of rough and ready aim. Often, indeed, they are of a sort that were constructed as weapons of precision but have been bored out by the official into blunderbusses.* The blunderbusses have been put in the front rack of the armoury. The official reaches out for a word and uses one of these without troubling to search in the racks behind for one that is more likely to hit the target in the middle.

The blunderbuss integrate, for instance, is now kept in front of join, combine, amalgamate, coordinate and others, and the hand stretching out for one of these gets no further. Develop blocks the way to happen, occur, take place and come. Alternative (a weapon of precision whose bore has been carelessly enlarged) stands before many simple words such as different, other, new, fresh, revised. Rehabilitate and recondition are in front of others, such as heal, mend, cure, repair, renovate and restore. Involve throws a whole section of the armoury into disuse, though not so big a one as that threatened by overall. And rack upon rack of simple prepositions are left untouched because before them are kept the blunderbusses of vague phrases such as in relation to, in regard to, in connection with and in the case of.

It may be said that it is generally easy enough to guess what is meant. But you have no business leaving your reader to guess, even though the guess may be easy. That is not doing your job properly. If you make a habit of not troubling to choose the right weapon of precision you may be sure that sooner or later you will set your reader a problem that is past guessing.

(13) If two words convey your meaning equally well, choose the common one rather than the less common. Here again official tendency is in the opposite direction, and you must be on your guard. Do not say regarding, respecting or concerning when you can say about. Do not use advert instead of refer, or state, inform or acquaint when you might use say or tell. Inform is a useful word, but it seems to attract adverbs as prim as itself, sometimes almost menacing. In kindly inform me the politeness rings hollow; all it does is to put a frigid and magisterial tone into your request. Perhaps you will inform me means that you have got to inform me, and no ‘perhaps’ about it, and I suspect the consequences may be serious for you. Furthermore is a prosy word used too often. It may be difficult to avoid it in a cumulative argument (moreover … in addition … too … also … again … furthermore) but choose one of the simpler words if they have not all been used up. Do not say hereto, herein, hereof, herewith, hereunder, or similar compounds with there, unless, like therefore, they have become part of the everyday language. Most of them put a flavour of legalism into any document in which they are used. Use a pronoun and perhaps a preposition instead. For instance:

With reference to the second paragraph thereof. (With reference to its second paragraph.)

I have received your letter and thank you for the information contained therein. (For the information it contains.)

I am to ask you to explain the circumstances in which the gift was made and to forward any correspondence relative thereto.

(Any correspondence about it.)

To take a few more examples of unnecessary choice of stilted expressions, do not say predecease for die before, ablution facilities for wash basins, it is apprehended that for I suppose, capable of locomotion for able to walk, will you be good enough to advise me for please tell me, I have endeavoured to obtain the required information for I have tried to find out what you wanted to know, it will be observed from a perusal of for you will see by reading.

These starchy words may not be bad English in their proper places, but you should avoid them for two reasons. First, some of the more unusual of them may actually be outside your reader’s vocabulary, and will convey no meaning at all. Second, their use runs counter to your duty to show that officials are human. These words give the reader the impression that officials are not made of common clay but are, in their own estimation at least, beings superior and aloof. They create the wrong atmosphere. The frost once formed by a phrase or two of this sort is not easily melted. If you turn back to the example given under rule (8) you will see how careful the writer of the revised version has been about this. The word individual (a technical term of income tax law to distinguish between a personal taxpayer and a corporate one) was unnecessary and has disappeared. Deduction of tax is translated into allowance, incapacitated into unable to work, is resident with into lives with, and by reason of old age or infirmity into because you are old or infirm.

Here is an example of words chosen for their simplicity:

If a worker’s clothing is destroyed beyond all hope of repair by an accident on his job his employer can apply to us for the coupons needed to replace it. This does not mean of course that anyone can get coupons if his boots fall to pieces through ordinary wear or if he just gets a tear in his trousers.

‘If he just gets a tear in his trousers’ not only conveys a clearer meaning than (say) ‘If his garments suffer comparatively minor damage and are capable of effective reconditioning’, it also creates a different atmosphere. The reader feels that these words were written by a human being and not a mere cog in the bureaucratic machine—almost that the writer might be rather a decent sort.

I have called this chapter ‘The Elements’ because in it I have suggested certain elementary rules—‘be short, be simple, be human’—for officials to follow in the duties that I have described as ‘explaining the law to the millions’. These rules apply no less to official writing of other kinds, and they will be elaborated in Chapters V to VIII, in which much of what has been said in this chapter will be expanded. I can claim no novelty for my advice. Similar precepts were laid down for the Egyptian Civil Service some thousands of years ago:

Be courteous and tactful as well as honest and diligent.

All your doings are publicly known, and must therefore

Be beyond complaint or criticism. Be absolutely impartial.

Always give a reason for refusing a plea; complainants

Like a kindly hearing even more than a successful plea.

Preserve dignity but avoid inspiring fear.

Be an artist in words, that you may be strong, for

The tongue is a sword …

If we may judge from the following letter, those brought up in this tradition succeeded in avoiding verbiage. It is from a Minister of Finance to a senior civil servant:

Apollonius to Zeno, greeting. You did right to send the chickpeas to Memphis. Farewell.