This is a plea for the mindful use of simple English.
I recently had a short assignment which was called English teaching but in reality turned out to be a very tough assignment not really concerned with learning English. The clients were a local professional company which offers services to local businesses in my part of Denmark. The reason I was called in was because the company had been taken over by an English speaking multinational company which immediately refused to pay for licences for the Danish version of Microsoft Office and required the employees to use their software for dealing with clients. So overnight, the employees found themselves in an English speaking digital environment even though they were still only servicing local Danish firms.
I was called in because the client management software was proving difficult to understand. And when I saw it I began to understand the magnitude of the problem. Not only were these professionals having to deal with their day to day work in English instead of Danish but the English that they were being asked to use was in the most obscure and tortured form I have seen in a long time.
So my job was not really teaching English but ended up being a screen by screen walk through of this client management software. It was important to be able to navigate it properly because to get from one screen to the next meant answering yes/no questions or making choices from drop-down menus which determined the route taken through the process.
The program was full of multi-level questions involving sometimes a triple negative which would challenge any native speaking professional never mind a low-level English speaking Dane.
Sentences of the type:
If the [sub-clause] is not [sub-clause] and not [verb] then the [complex noun] shall be deemed to be not [complex adjectival phrase]. Is the [repeat sub-clause 1] relevant? Yes/No?
- All the language in square brackets is industry specific language.
- The passive tense was used a great deal.
- There were many multi-conditional questions.
- There were several examples where the same word was used to refer to two different concepts in different places in the program.
- There were several examples where the same concept was referred to by more one word at different places in the program.
I was reminded of the fact that the aeronautical industry has implemented plain English almost since its inception in order to avoid potentially catastrophic misunderstanding.
- Passives are avoided
- Sentences are short
- One word stands for one concept
- One concept is always conveyed by the same word
All these are strategies to avoid misunderstanding.
It struck me that as English spreads as the language of commerce, the least we monolingual English speakers could do is to make our systems easier to understand by non-native speakers.
I felt palpably the stress and anger these people were going through as a result of being reduced to not being able to do their jobs which hitherto they had been very competent in.
For specific tips on writing plain English consult http://www.faa.gov/documentlibrary/media/order/branding_writing/order1000_36.pdf