Plain Words Read Online Free

‘Better then to write as if we were speaking to the recipient of our communication’. Though shortish, this sentence is neither simple, with its inflated vocabulary, nor human, with its patronising ‘we’. Had the team absorbed Gowers’s maxim, which they print thirty-one times in their manual, they might instead have said, ‘When you write to someone, use a plain and friendly style’.
    In March 1948, in a debate in Parliament on ‘Government English’, Mr Keeling, representing Twickenham, revealed that important official documents had been discovered to be incomprehensible to the general public. He argued that unless something was done about this, the business of various departments would fall into disrepute. He then welcomed the fact that
Plain Words
was about to be published, and hoped that it would help. Mr Pritt, Hammersmith North, could not resist a cutting response: ‘I have often wondered what the Tory party were interested in. They are not interested in getting anything done. But when we are talking about words their attendance is doubled—there are about seven of them’.
    It may surprise the modern reader that Gowers soon found himself criticised for being too liberal in his advice: he discovered for himself, what he would later be told by one of the OUP ‘scrutineers’ who helped him to revise Fowler, that he would have to ‘mediate between the old hatters and the mad hatters’. The old hatters were disgruntled by his willingness in
Plain Words
to break what they considered ‘the rules’, even as the mad hatters interpreted his advice to write plainly as an example of ‘the snobbishness of the educated’. Meanwhile in odd corners of
Whitehall much was made of the impropriety of encouraging junior civil servants to be plain with their superiors.
    Though Gowers wrote about ‘rules’, he made it clear that he understood them as conventions. His view in sum was this: ‘Public opinion decides all these questions in the long run. There is little individuals can do about them. Our national vocabulary is a democratic institution, and what is generally accepted will ultimately be correct’. How long a given rule might stand was anybody’s guess. He therefore advised civil servants, who must write comprehensible English for unknown readers, that they should neither ‘perpetuate what is obsolescent’ nor ‘give currency to what is novel’, but should ‘follow what is generally regarded … as the best practice for the time being’.
BRINGING PLAIN WORDS UP TO DATE
    That is all very well, but who can say what current ‘best practice’ is? Old hatters and mad hatters continue to broadcast their views. Some believe that Good English, bounded by antique superstitions, is their birthright, to be fought for with the ardour of the Light Brigade at Balaclava. Others dismiss so-called ‘good’ so-called ‘English’ as a risible manifestation of elitism. It is daunting to have to pick a path between these two camps, yet a fresh revision of
Plain Words
must do just that. Gowers once remarked that if a person were forced to choose, ‘it would be better to be ungrammatical and intelligible than grammatical and unintelligible’, only to add, ‘But we do not have to choose between the two’. Perhaps this new edition of his book is best thought of as being for those who instinctively agree, but who seek guidance on the prevailing conventions—so far as they can be discovered—of clear, formal prose.
    When Gowers’s work first came out, he was praised by
The Times
for his ‘sweetly reasonable’ advice, and by the
Daily
Telegraph

for a prose style that was ‘itself a model of how plain words should be used’. After sixty years, it has of course been necessary here and there to modernise both his advice and his writing, and I have attempted to do so, but lightly. There are instances in the original where Gowers’s style no longer stands. He starts sentences with the word
nay
, says the