Customer Reviews

The Complete Plain Words

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This book was originally written for bureaucrats so that they might better communicate officialese. Yet it really goes further: it can be used, appreciated, by anyone wishing to improve or confirm their knowledge of written English. Gowers writes in compact, sometimes dryly humourous, style, as he corrects the often confused use of "which-that" and "who-whom", the employment or negligence of the subjunctive, and punctuation. It's an enjoyable,educative work relevant to today, with the English language changing and, perhaps, degrading.

The Complete Plain Words is an excellent resource for people who write as part of their occupation. Although written in 1948 for British civil servants, I believe it is still useful for just about anybody in government or business who must write the occasional report, memo, or e-mail.

One thing that did surprise me a little from the book is just how wordy it is. Unfortunately, the author does not always follow his own advice to use the simple approach and to get to the point quickly. How much easier said than done.

Here's some of his advice from his chapter "The Choice of Words":

"Use no more words than are necessary to express your meaning, for if you use more you are likely to obscure it and to tire your reader. In particular do not use superfluous adjectives and adverbs and do not use roundabout phrases where single words would serve.

Use familiar words rather than the far-fetched, if they express your meaning equally well; for the familiar are more likely to be readily understood.

Use words with a precise meaning rather than those that are vague, for they will obviously serve better to make your meaning clear; and in particular prefer concrete words to the abstract, for they are more likely to have a precise meaning."

The author Sir Ernest Gowers also realizes that language and the written form of it are subject to change, which is refreshing. As such, his advice is to write using the conventions of the day, but always to shun the experimental forms of slang, short-hand expressions, and plain lazy writing. Sir Gowers writes:

"English is not static - neither in vocabulary nor in grammar, nor yet in that elusive quality called style. The fashion in prose alternates between the ornate and the plain, the periodic and the colloquial. Grammar and punctuation defy all the efforts of grammarians to force them into the mould of a permanent code of rules. Old words drop out and change their meanings; new words are admitted. What was stigmatized by the purists of one generation as a corruption of the language may a few generations later be accepted as an enrichment, and what was then common currency may have become a pompous archaism or acquired a new significance."

Although this book will certainly not replace "The Elements of Style" by Strunk and White as the preeminent writing guide, "The Complete Plain Words" is an excellent resource for all writers struggling to communicate in a clear, concise fashion.

This is how bureaucrats should answer questions in writing. It works.! It works! It works! And the author's bio is very interesting.

Gowers who at one pointed headed England's 'Internal Revenue' originally wrote the two works combined in this 'Complete Plain Writing' as a guide for bureaucrats and public officials. He wished to teach them how to get across their message concisely and clearly. His first idea is that the person must know what they want to say, and then find the way to express it clearly. This involves according to Gowers a kind of civility, a kind of consideration of the 'other' and the way they understand things. Gowers provides a guide to correct usage and grammar which also parses individual words and expressions. He writes about the development of the language in general and describes the way neologisms enter the language. He points out how the experts and authorities have limited control over this process. For instance Jonathan Swift did not like the word 'mob' and thought its use should be discontinued. The mob however had their way and we are still using the term. Gowers also provides guidance to a lot of grammatical questions that plague many. He tells us for instance to prefer 'that' to ' which' in almost all cases and to use neither most of the time. He urges concision and clarity again and again.
It is important to note that this guide is for a certain kind of writing only. I think that in many ways its advice is completely contrary to what we find in for instance great poetic writing. There the ambiguity and complication, the complexity irony and difficulty are elements in making us wish to reread and reread the writing. This guide is for the kind of writing which is meant to be understood at once in a complete way.
I feel there is certainly much I could learn from this book and I believe that is true of most readers and writers.

The book provides an excellent reference for those who want to be correct in their use of the English language and who need the occasional reminder of what is correct English.

`Catachresis' is a simple Greek word meaning `misuse'. If you had never come across it in English before, neither had I until I read it in the second chapter of this book, where it is displayed proudly in the course of a lesson to us on the correct use of the word `jargon'. The first edition of the book appeared in 1948, and it has reappeared in at least 5 revisions and reprints, my own copy dating from 1964. It must have sold well in that case, and while it purports to be trying to teach the British civil service how to write clearly, the author soon forgets this limited aim and treats us to yet another enthusiastic handbook on the proper use of English, a field I had thought well and truly ploughed and reploughed by Fowler, Quiller-Couch, A P Herbert and others. This is how it will have been read by its eager public, and so this is how it should be assessed. Half a century is not nearly long enough for such a work to go out of date, but of course a lot of the interest in reading it today is precisely in seeing how well it has stood the test of so many years, particularly in the age of email. However I found it even more interesting from a sociological viewpoint. `Who's talking?' I kept asking myself. Who feels like pontificating in print on this subject, and why should the rest of us take any notice?

We can forget the ostensible objective. Who on earth supposes that the language of the civil service is even trying to be clear much of the time? Whitehall mandarins write memos designed in the main to cover their rear, just as commercial executives do. When clarity is really their aim, it is perfectly compatible with lumpish expression, bad grammar, bad syntax, bad spelling and bad handwriting. The best-crafted English in the world will not make what they say unambiguous in a court of law, as is memorably shown by the story of the use of cleaning-rags `in shops and places other than shops'. You, I and they might have thought that covered all possibilities, but not according to the judge who ruled that a mobile ice-cream tricycle was not a place. This book is really just another guide to good English, for the general public. As such, it is intelligent, balanced, stylish, clear and good-humoured. Gowers is neither pedantic nor unduly tolerant of shoddy writing. He understands that a language is a living thing, and he does his best to judge which neologisms are part of the organic development of the language and which are pimples and warts that could do with removing. Any educated reader with an ear for the language and a love of the language could probably do as well as he does, and I wonder what he would have made of the use of `rendition' in 2005. I feel he is wasting his breath with his complaints about philosophers' idiom at the start of chapter 8 - philosophers have to write they way they do, just as lawyers have to. Checking his tastes against my own, I find us largely in agreement. I shall go to my final reckoning innocent of using `anticipate' to mean `expect', or `aftermath' to mean `outcome'. On the other hand I think he overdoes his objection to `feasible' in the sense of `plausible', and I can't see that `the troops were issued with rations' is any worse than `the troops were given rations', but I shall correct my use of `comprise' in future in accordance with his strictures. I also agree that brevity makes for clarity, but it has its pitfalls too, as in a recipe that told me `remove dish from oven and stand on a hot plate', or as in the exam question `What can be said with confidence about...?' which got the answer `Anything. Just say it with confidence'. And I wondered during chapter 8 whether the author was familiar with the term `agglutinative', which gives respectability to expressions consisting entirely of nouns, e.g. `city dockside warehouse fire'.

Who's telling us all this anyhow? It's not just Ernest Gowers, it's Sir Ernest Gowers. Anyone using his title like this invites derision. Did his wife say to him at breakfast `Would you like more toast, Sir Ernest?', or perhaps, in those tender intimate moments, `That was wonderful, Sir Ernest, how was it for you?' The whole attitude underlying the book is a memorial of an era when Whitehall was the High Indaba of the British establishment. Future Sir Ernests took firsts in classics at Cambridge, joined the civil service and were later appointed to chair the Coal Mines Reorganisation Commission (later the Coal Commission) and similar. They were the mandarin administrators of Clement Attlee's socialist commonwealth of Britain and they lived by the gospel of Whitehall Knows Best. They recruited and assessed their successors in the manner of wine-experts judging a grand cru, and they brought a similar fastidiousness to their style of writing. Clarity was important mainly for giving them a criterion in criticising the writing of other civil servants, what really mattered was a special elevated style, or what they took for such a style. Out of hours they wrote, and - worse - read, articles and letters of dumbfounding pomposity in The Times newspaper expounding this or that nicety in the use of English. They were clever men (mainly), they were upright and dedicated men, they were highly educated men, but the mystery to me in retrospect is why equally educated members of the general public ever took seriously the pretensions of any chairman of the Coal Mines Reorganisation Commission (later the Coal Commission) to special expertise in the use of English. If I had at any stage been the boss of the future Sir Ernest on his way up and had caught him wrestling with The Choice of Words or such like preoccupations in His Majesty's time and at the taxpayer's expense, I think my own words to him would have been a model of the clarity he values so highly, and they would have been `Get on with what you're paid to do'.