Now the New Zealand government is trying to draw a thick red line on the worst offenders, with a new law requiring bureaucrats to use plain, understandable language to communicate with the public. The controversial bill passed second reading last month after colorful parliamentary debate, but still faces a final vote before becoming law. “I wandered lonely as a cloud, floating on high valleys and hills, When suddenly I saw a host, a host, of golden daffodils,” MP Sarah Pallett reported in Parliament. “Beautiful,” she continued. “Basically: “I was feeling sad. I went for a stroll. I saw many beautiful daffodils and they cheered me up at once” – good old Wordsworth. But that is the place for flowery, inaccessible language – in poetry and literature, not in government legislation.” The plain language bill will require government communications to the public to be “clear, concise, well-organized and appropriate for the public.” For the country’s anti-guzzling brigade, it’s a victory: they say pure language is a matter of social justice and a democratic right. “People living in New Zealand have a right to understand what the government is asking them to do and what their rights are, what they are entitled to from the government,” says MP Rachel Boyack, who introduced the bill.
“Mistakes were made”
Advocates say there is huge room for improvement in New Zealand government communications. For example, the country has an annual plain language award that includes a “best sentence transformation” trophy. This quote, from the government’s statistics department, recently took the prize: During the year we tested the organization’s readiness for innovation and adaptability to change, made significant changes to our priorities and investment approaches, moved to activity-based work and saw teams across Stats respond by giving time to focus on addressing customer and internal pain points. “ Done: We tested how ready our organization was to innovate and make changes. We also changed our approach to prioritization and investment, and moved to a flexible way of working for our staff. In response, staff focused on resolving their own and customer frustrations.” Another attempt was made by the New Zealand Transport Authority: Where this has been identified and it is possible to update this, it has been taken to ensure that the future allocation of the band is correct.” Transformed into: Where possible, we have identified and updated the affected submodels to ensure they are assigned the correct levy zone in the future. Bad sentences are more than an aesthetic concern, says Lynda Harris, who started the awards and runs plain language consultancy Write Ltd. Government communications decide the most intimate and important parts of people’s lives: their immigration status, divorce papers, entitlements to welfare benefits or ability to build a home. When people send letters of this nature, “they describe their tears of frustration, their anger, because they just tried to do something,” she says. When governments communicate in ways people don’t understand, it can lead to people not engaging with the services available to them, losing trust in government and not being able to fully participate in society, Boyack says. Those most affected are people who speak English as a second language, have not attended university, have disabilities or are elderly. The bill is not universally supported. Advocates say some parts don’t have clear enough definitions. New Zealand’s opposition argues it will add further layers of bureaucracy and cost, in the form of plain-language monitoring officers, without actually improving communication with the public. “Let me speak in extremely simple language,” said National MP Chris Bishop. “This bill is the stupidest bill that has come to parliament this term. The National will abolish it”. Labor lawmakers argue that ultimately, it will pay off – through higher tax compliance, less time spent by call centers and staff dealing with a confused public and increased trust in government.
“Language is a vehicle”
Can clearer sentences really achieve all this? Possibly not. But advocates say plain language is a boon for accountability as well as understanding. “Language is a vehicle. It’s just a means to an end,” says Harris: it needs to tell people what happened, who was responsible and what can be done. In an ideal world, this would mean an end to artifacts like “mistakes were made”: a propositional structure where mistakes float unfettered by responsible parties, relied on by politicians and bureaucracies to hide responsibility. One political commentator called it the “past exculpatory” tense — and it appears reliably in the phrase related to police shootings: “Officers encountered a male suspect … at which point an officer-involved shooting occurred,” says a Los Angeles police department Example gathered from Washington Post. “Language is not an objective view of reality,” says linguist Dr Andreea Calude. “We all use language to try to frame the kind of scene we’re describing in a way that suits us.” Plain language may leave a little less room for maneuver, he says – but simpler sentences aren’t an automatic route to transparency. “I don’t think plain language can really solve this problem. As long as people are creative, playful and inventive, I think they will find ways to deal with it.”
