Policy for Campaigns 10: Bad language
How important is clear and correct English in policy documents?
Writing good English that communicates a message clearly and persuasively can be one of the great pleasures of policy work. It’s certainly an important skill, as can be seen very clearly from its prominence in policy job descriptions. As the previous article also explored, in policy writing, as in any form of communication, you must be able to use language that is appropriate to the audience you are addressing.
Language undoubtedly matters, for multiple reasons. If you can’t use language correctly, then you cannot put your message across. This article explores some of the implications of this in policy work: why being able to write to a professional standard matters; what clarity of language says about how the writer understands the concepts they are dealing with; how language can be used as a tool in campaigning; and what makes for good “policy English”.
Professionalism matters
You will write about policy for a varied set of audiences. Some may care about how you use language more than others. And certainly, some people won’t notice bad writing at all.
But your writing can be bad in at least two different ways. It might simply be of a poor quality, meaning it is hard to understand, does not get its point across clearly, or does not present your arguments in a style that is palatable to the intended audience. Or more basically, it might contain straightforward errors: this can mean grammar and punctuation, or using words in a way that does not accord with their meaning.
In the case of straightforward errors, it may be unfair that some of your audience will discount your arguments if the grammar and so on is bad, but they will. Some of your readers won’t have sufficiently strong English skills and knowledge themselves to notice the mistakes. Some will notice the mistakes, but not think them very important. But some will both notice and care. And if your key decision-maker happens to be in that group, you might just have stuffed your entire campaign in a very careless way.
I won’t labour the point, but the threshold for presenting work to a professional standard, with the consistent use of technically correct English, is fairly clear. Most organisations with professional staff meet it consistently. A policy document with numerous errors of language has not been presented to a professional standard, just as a website whose headings and text have numerous errors of language is not presented to a professional standard. And if an organisation cannot present its work to a professional standard, it will inevitably raise the question in at least some people’s minds of whether it can deliver the substance of its work to a professional standard.
Clarity of language is necessary for clarity about concepts
As I observed in the first of these articles, being clear about the concepts you are dealing with requires clarity about the words and terminology you use to describe them.
It’s not uncommon (maybe increasingly common, or maybe that’s grumpy middle age talking) for people to use words incorrectly, either because they simply get the meaning wrong, or because they’re grasping for a similar-sounding word and getting mixed up.
Examples I’ve encountered in real life include:
Allured to, instead of alluded to
Prescribe to, rather than subscribe to
Jubulant (sic), rather than jubilant
take someone over the bridge, instead of over (or to) the brink / edge
Disband myths, instead of debunk myths
Detract instead of distract
Numerable instead of numerous.
In face-to-face conversation this isn’t necessarily a problem (although in conversation with high powered, senior stakeholders, it could be), but in formal policy writing it definitely is. Quite apart from the issue of professionalism outlined above, there is a strong risk that someone who is not disciplined about, or skilled in, using language correctly might be giving away a lack of clarity in their thinking. It particularly raises questions about whether they have key concepts clear in their heads.
Perhaps the classic policy example would be tax evasion and tax avoidance. The former is, by definition, unlawful; the latter is not (although it could still be somewhat contrived and contrary to what the law intends, even if not what it says). Anyone working in tax policy will have the two very clearly distinguished in their mind, and will invariably use the correct term: they would no more say evasion when they mean avoidance than they would say dog when they mean cat. Someone who mixes the two up is probably giving away that their grasp of the distinction isn’t so strong. The use of ambiguous terms should also set alarm bells ringing: is the person using the term “tax dodging” because they’re not clear about the distinction, or because they want to blur it for their own ends?
Another, somewhat more topical, example would be the distinction between the role of party leader and the role of Prime Minister. Careless headlines from many media organisations (I was watching Sky News last week, but I doubt they will have been alone) stated that Liz Truss had resigned as Prime Minister last Friday. She had not: she had resigned as leader of the Conservative Party, and her resignation as PM would follow only when a new leader had been elected. Yet clearly many people believed she had gone immediately: shoddy reporting, to which a shoddy use of language is central, undermines the public’s understanding of politics and our constitution. Good luck getting a technical policy point across to a large audience in this environment.
Language as a tool
One way to get your campaigning argument across, particularly if you are aiming for a non-technical audience who may not be already familiar with your issue, is to use language in a loaded way. Language offers you an opportunity to frame your arguments in a way that helps you achieve your aims: by bundling up concepts in the language you use, you will be able to count on some of your audience (and any journalists who might be intermediaries) struggling (or not bothering) to unbundle them. They will therefore understand your arguments in a way that is informed by your perspective. It’s a cynical tactic, but widely used.
The Treasury deployed a classic form of this under Labour in the late 2000s. It presented an analysis that some small firms were engaged in “income shifting”: the latter word in particular immediately makes the activity sound suspicious and undesirable. Their critique was that small companies, typically owned by a husband and wife, were used to reduce tax on one partner’s income by distributing half of it as profits to the other shareholder: if the other shareholder had no other income, they could use their tax allowance on it, reducing the overall tax owed. However, the flip-side of this is that if the other shareholder / spouse had no other income, that meant they were exposed to the commercial risk of the business: if the business did badly, they had no income at all. Those of us opposing the Treasury line therefore felt that it misunderstood the basic concepts at work: it conflated issues such as income, revenue and profits, and wrapped the conflation up in a deliberately imprecise and loaded new term, invented specially for the purpose. (The case against this critique was more than just special pleading: this scenario had been explicitly recognised when the independent taxation of spouses was introduced; it was a feature, not a bug, and the Government’s own business advice service had been advising people to set up their companies in this way for years).
I therefore suggested using the term “Family Business Tax” for the proposals to tax the profits distributed to both shareholders income as if it was one person’s income directly from their labour. This term was a more accurate use of language, and in fact revealed why the proposals were eventually dropped as unworkable. The Treasury could not find a way to distinguish the “bad” forms of jointly owned businesses (typically IT contractors and similar micro-businesses, who the Treasury and Inland Revenue / HMRC institutionally view as tax dodgers, as this revealing recent tweet from one of the senior officials of the day unwittingly reveals) from “good” forms of jointly owned businesses such as family shops, which of course operate in exactly the same way.
Looking back, the battle of terminology on this issue reflected the battle about underlying concepts: the loaded language used by Treasury and Revenue officials betrayed their inadequate grasp of both the key concepts and how they related to real-world practice, which was ultimately laid bare when they just couldn’t get the proposals to work.
There are of course many other examples of campaigns by governments and their opponents using loaded language to promote their case. The Conservatives famously created posters criticising a proposed Labour “death tax” to describe a charge on people’s estates to fund a new National Care Service, and around the same time used the term “the deficit” to bundle up a bogus argument that the principal difficulty facing the economy, and therefore the country, was the state of the public finances. Prior to that, the Labour Government had made liberal use of the phrase “weapons of mass destruction” to imply that Iraq posed a direct threat to the UK when it did not.
What are your favourite examples?
What is good “policy English”?
Writing appropriately for different audiences means deploying different styles. You may sometimes need to write in strong, campaign-oriented language, for instance. This may involve an attacking style, criticising faults and failures by others, or putting the case in directly emotional terms.
There is an interesting dynamic at work with using this stronger style of writing, in that it’s easier for you to write it as strongly as the evidence permits and then let someone else dial it down in an edit, than the other way round: if, say, a comms or public affairs colleague is editing your work, wants to make the case in stronger terms, but has not done the policy legwork that you have, they might not know how strong they can go while still being supported by the evidence. It’s therefore helpful for this aspect of the campaign to be clearly policy-led.
The response I wrote to the Family Business Tax proposals mentioned above is an example of a policy document written in an attacking style. There were reasons for this in context: the organisation I worked for was very clear that it favoured more robust approaches in its policy documents (at that time), and the legislation came in response to a court case that the Revenue had lost, and where we had funded the winning taxpayer. It was therefore a situation in which as an organisation we pretty much had to take a tough line, and where officials evidently didn’t feel able to engage constructively with our arguments anyway. The tax and accountancy bodies, by contrast, made rather more polite versions of the same arguments as part of their work on the issue.
While I wouldn’t write absolutely every word of it today as I did then, I still feel it met the brief and more or less stands up: it’s certainly one of the most aggressive formal policy documents I’ve ever written, and the directness of its attack on the proposals probably makes it all the more useful now for explaining why they could not be made to work. It very directly addresses the concepts at issue, and attacks the Treasury for misunderstanding them: it directly addresses questions of language and terminology in order to do this, as well as setting out how the key concepts operate in numerous real-world examples.
However, the circumstances in which I was required to write such an aggressive policy document don’t often arise. More commonly, you may be writing in more formal and sober policy language, in the expectation of it being read by other policy professionals (for instance in decision-making and delivery bodies), professional but non-specialist audiences, or lay audiences with an interest. Somewhat separate to that is the language needed for information products for service users, which is a discipline in its own right.
So, what constitutes good policy English? Irritating though it may be to have to acknowledge it, some of the clearest professional English is written by lawyers. This is certainly true of a document I’d offer as a good example of policy writing: the report of the Hillsborough Independent Panel. It’s well worth having a look at the summary: it’s a devastating, compelling masterpiece. It offers a clear, plain narrative at the start, and sets out a clear sequence of events. Beyond its narrative sections, it provides clear explanation and analysis, including for instance of the differences between the 1989 disaster and an earlier crush incident in 1981 in which fatalities had been avoided. It offers an explanation of complex factors including both physical ones (the layout and structure of the stadium) and institutional ones, such as conflicting organisational priorities and cultural views held by several organisations about Liverpool supporters, and how these combined to cause the disaster. Its language is plain, but not necessarily simple: it’s not afraid of using reasonably long sentences, which for some audiences I would be inclined to break down into two or more, but which are nonetheless easy to follow and entirely appropriate for a formal document of this sort. I have had it in mind as a model of effectiveness and clarity in writing formal English since its publication ten years ago.
I don’t propose to outline a detailed set of advice or guidelines in this article (maybe in a later one, if anyone would be interested), but a few basics will be apparent from a glance through the Hillsborough report. Ensure you know the meaning of the words you are using, and deploy them correctly. Stick to your style guide, and use conventions consistently. Keep your expression simple. And avoid not just jargon, but jargonese: less capable writers give themselves away by using overly fancy words when simple ones would do, or using the passive voice to try to disguise uncertainty about something (for example, saying “it was decided” implies that you don’t know who decided it or why, or perhaps that it was you and you don’t want to get blamed for it). Another pitfall can be to write academic prose: every academic discipline has its own jargon, and I spent the first few years of my career un-learning how to write for the audience of academic historians who had taught me as an undergraduate.
What’s your view of what counts as good “policy English”? Let me know in the comments, in the LinkedIn group or on Twitter. I could do a more “dos and don’ts”, but it would be personal to me – there is some taste and preference involved, after all. But let me know if you’d like to read it, or alternatively tell me yours.