Every language has its official expressions that ordinary people struggle to understand. Every profession develops its own jargon. People repeat fashionable phrases without stopping to ask what they mean. And then there are the old sayings and metaphors that people keep recycling, sometimes so badly that the original meaning has disappeared altogether. Perhaps some of them belong in a museum by now.
Finnish can hide a simple act inside a wonderfully long formal expression. English can accomplish the same thing by lining up several impressive words. I have also lived through various attempts to "update" Finnish grammar and vocabulary to reflect spoken language better. Some of those changes make sense. Others make me wonder whether somebody is trying to improve communication or simply introduce a new approved way of saying things. Newspeak, anyone?
The language changes, but the hiding place remains. We can make a sentence sound official, modern or sophisticated without making its meaning any clearer.
Plain language is not small language
I sometimes get the impression that people confuse plain language with making everything simple. That is not what I understand Orwell to be saying.
Some subjects are difficult because the subject itself is difficult. Law, medicine and engineering need exact terminology. So does management consulting, for that matter. Replacing a correct technical term with some vague everyday expression may make a sentence easier to read, but if it changes the meaning, what have we achieved? Certainly not better communication.
The question is whether the difficult word earns its place. Can I explain it? Does the reader need it? Is there another word that means the same thing without making the reader work so hard? And if the technical term really is necessary, perhaps I should explain what it means rather than expect everybody to know.
A friend and colleague once started docking his subordinates 20 bucks for every word he could remove from their reports without changing the substance. The reports became very short, very quickly. To be fair, he paid the team's bar tabs with the money. Those were the days!
There is a serious point behind that little story. Orwell's rules encourage us to use no more words than we need to carry the meaning. They do not ask us to remove the meaning along with the words.
Fluent speech can still be empty
People often judge someone's understanding by how fluently that person speaks. I have seen enough of working life to be suspicious of that assumption.
A worker may speak English as a second or third language, with a limited vocabulary and rather creative grammar, yet understand the work far better than the fluent manager explaining it. An accent does not weaken a fact, and a grammatical mistake does not make an observation false. Finnish "Rally English" has certainly not prevented our drivers from becoming world champions. They seem to get their message across rather well when it matters.
Meanwhile, a perfectly fluent speaker can talk for ten minutes without telling anybody what actually happened, what needs to change or who should do something about it. The vocabulary may be impressive, the delivery confident and the sentences grammatically immaculate. I have listened to such presentations and wondered whether I was the only person in the room who had no idea what the speaker was trying to say.
Perhaps I was. But perhaps everybody else was wondering the same thing and nobody wanted to admit it.
I care considerably more about whether I understand what happened and what must happen next than whether the speaker could pass an advanced English examination. Perfect English, or any other language, is optional. Clear meaning is not.
Jargon can keep people outside
Professional terminology has its uses. When two engineers discuss a technical problem, they should not have to explain every term to each other. The same applies to doctors, lawyers, accountants and consultants. Shared terminology can save time and prevent misunderstandings.
The trouble begins when the people involved do not share that knowledge, and the expert carries on as though they do.
A customer may sign a contract without understanding an important obligation because the person explaining it sounds certain. A patient may leave a doctor's appointment knowing the proper name of a condition but having little idea what to do at home. An employee may nod through a management presentation because asking what "strategic alignment" means would feel embarrassing.
The expert has spoken. Has communication actually happened?
This is where professional judgement matters. I should be able to explain a technical term in words the other person understands, without losing what makes the term technically correct. And I should find out whether my explanation worked. Not by interrogating the poor fellow like a USMC drill sergeant, but through a normal conversation.
If somebody does not understand what I have said, repeating it more loudly or adding another technical expression is unlikely to help. Perhaps I need to explain it differently. Perhaps I have not understood it well enough myself.
That last possibility can be rather uncomfortable for an expert.
Plain language is not an excuse for being rude
There is another misunderstanding that deserves attention. Some people seem to think that speaking plainly gives them permission to be unpleasant. They say something needlessly cruel and then announce, "Well, I'm just being direct."
Congratulations. You have managed to be both direct and rude. I don't recall Orwell recommending that combination.
Plain language should help us describe what happened without turning an observation into a judgement about the whole person. "You are careless" is an accusation. "You sent the order without checking the delivery address" identifies an act that we can examine and correct. The second statement may still be uncomfortable to hear, but at least the person knows what we are discussing.
The distinction matters in management, consulting and ordinary life. If I tell someone that their attitude is wrong, what exactly are they supposed to change? If I describe what I observed and explain why it concerns me, we have something to talk about. And I had better be prepared to listen, because my interpretation may not be the only possible one.
The same thing happens at home. "You never listen" is easy to throw across the room. "I was hurt when you walked away while I was speaking" says what happened and how I experienced it. That is a rather different conversation, and not necessarily an easier one.
Plain language does not remove the need for tact or judgement. In fact, when the words become more precise, we may have to take more responsibility for what we say.
Translation can reveal poor thinking
Working between languages has taught me something else. Sometimes a sentence becomes difficult to translate because the thought underneath it was never particularly clear.
Take a familiar management expression such as "enable strategic value delivery". What exactly does that mean in Finnish? Better still, what does it mean in English?
Who is going to do what, and what value will somebody receive? If I cannot answer those questions, finding a Finnish equivalent will not rescue the sentence. I will merely have produced the same confusion in another language.
I can work in Finnish and English rather fluently, but translating certain professional expressions still makes me scratch my head. Sometimes there simply is no convenient equivalent. Other times the difficulty comes from trying to preserve an expression that was never doing much useful work in the first place.
Trying to explain the same thought in another language forces me to examine what I actually mean. I cannot always rely on the familiar phrase. I have to find the action, relationship or consequence underneath it.
And that is useful even when no translation is involved. Try explaining your next important report to somebody outside your profession. If the ordinary-language version says something different, perhaps the original needs another look.
Yeah, I know. There is only so much time available for writing reports. But how much time do we save by sending people something they cannot understand?
Meaning comes first
I am certainly not campaigning for one approved version of English, Finnish or any other language. That would be a rather strange final conclusion to draw from Orwell.
People should keep their own voices, dialects and ways of expressing themselves. Humour should survive too. A language without those things might be wonderfully consistent, but I suspect it would also be rather dead. I practise several dialects myself and occasionally attempt humour. The results vary, particularly when I try both at the same time. As if that isn't obvious already!
Nor do I think every sentence must be short. Sometimes a longer explanation is exactly what the reader needs. A short sentence can be just as empty as a long one, especially if nobody has bothered to decide what it means.
What matters is whether the words help another person understand the thought, the fact, the decision or the action. And whether that person has a fair opportunity to question it.
Orwell wrote about English, but his warning belongs to anybody who uses language to inform, persuade, instruct or advise. That includes most of us, at work and at home.
Plain language is not Plain English. Or Finnish. Or any other language. It is making sure that the meaning survives the words. And if I cannot explain what I mean, perhaps the first thing I need to improve is not my language.
Perhaps it is my thinking.
George Orwell, Politics and the English Language: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/
A conversation is a good place to start
If people in your organisation spend more time explaining what they meant than getting things done, there may be something worth examining. It might be how decisions are communicated, how responsibilities are understood or simply how people talk to one another.
That's the sort of thing I work on with clients at Balete Works. We can start with an initial conversation about what is happening in your organisation and what you would like to be different.
Visit www.baleteworks.com or send me a message here on LinkedIn. No strings attached.