It is incumbent upon legislators to pen their semantic outpourings in a manner comprehensible to the populus … Sorry, government language should be simple, argues Justin Pearce
‘ESSENTIAL budgetary reforms, linked to the enhancement of systems and institutional management and the improvement of professional practice, will bring major equity, efficiency and productivity gains, amounting to a massive improvement in the effectiveness of the public investment in education services, but no net reduction in budgetary requirements, especially in the short term.”
We’ve all come across language like this at some time or another. Those of us with the benefit of high school education may reach the end of the sentence feeling irritated at the pomposity of the person who wrote it – – the rest of us are unlikely to make it past the first
It’s this realisation that has inspired a little band of politicians, lawyers and academics, led by ANC MP Willie Hofmeyr, to take up the campaign for comprehensible language in government, the law and business. At the same time, Justice Minister Dullah Omar has realised that the way most laws are written is some of the worst examples of unnecessarily obscure language, and has expressed a commitment to untangling the deadly sentences.
“Simplicity in language represents a commitment to democracy,” Omar said last week. “The use of language above the heads of the average citizen may swell the heads of its users, but it does little else.”
Omar was speaking at a seminar hosted by the Ministry of Justice, where legal drafters got together with plain language experts from abroad to look at ways in which public documents can — and should — be expressed in terms that make sense to the people who use them, and not just to lawyers. Over the past decade, national and state governments in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and the United States have started making their laws and documents more user- friendly. In South Africa, with its high rate of illiteracy and a large number of people who still have to communicate in a language which is not their own, the need for plain language is even more urgent.
Professor Shadrack Gutto of the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand argues that government should approach language from the point of view of those who are most marginalised, and scrap the notion that complicated language is somehow proper. “What is proper is what is useful for society,” Gutto insists.
But the drive for simple language is more than just an ethical concern. It is a practical one as well. Complicated government documents mean that people fill in their forms incorrectly, fill in the wrong forms, or have to go back to the counter several times — all of which means employing more civil servants to deal with the problems.
The British government reportedly saved Stg 250-million in administrative costs in its first 10 years of using plain-language documents. In South Africa, the Black Sash reports that 21 percent of enquiries at its advice offices come from people who need help with understanding contracts or government forms — enquiries which could be eliminated by the use of plain language in the first place.
In the private sector, companies that present their clients with easily-understood contracts — and legal firms that are committed to drawing up such contracts – – have a natural edge in the market.
“In Australia, law firms are competing on the basis of the plainness of the documents they compile,” said Australian lawyer and plain language campaigner Christopher Balmford. “Two law firms pioneered this before the campaign even started. They recognised that plain language can add value to your business.”
At least one South African legal firm has already thrown its weight behind the plain language campaign. But how will the legal establishment as a whole respond to the call for a simpler use of vernacular languages? While the campaign in South Africa is too young to have drawn any criticism, Canadian lawyer Phil Knight says a few lawyers in Canada remain sceptical about the moves to plain language. They fear that anything other than the tried and tested legal formulas will not stand up to judicial scrutiny in court.
“We say, you don’t have that certainty in the first place,” Knight insists. “Any document is interpreted in terms of the facts of the case.”
Whatever certainty may be provided by complex wording comes at too high a cost, Knight believes. “The best way is not to write in a way that only a judge will
At present, people run to lawyers on matters which they could deal with themselves if only the documents involved were comprehensible to the lay person.
Knight believes that a fundamental conservatism is the real reason behind the misguided fear of the campaign by some lawyers: “If you do something in a certain way for 30 years and someone says ‘change’, your immediate response is to say ‘no’.”
In South Africa, with the change from two to 11 official languages, more and more legal documents will have to be translated. Plain language will help translators and interpreters who at present struggle to translate convoluted English or Afrikaans into African
If the principle of multilingualism is to have any practical use, Omar says, the official languages must be used in a way that people can understand: “We do not need 11 versions of gobbledygook.”
The endless sentence about “essential budgetary reforms” comes, incidentally, from the government’s recent White Paper on Education, page 84, section 19 (1). Plain language proponents suggest it might be rewritten as follows: “We must change the way we spend our money. At the same time we must find better ways of doing our work. This will make the education system fairer, and make it operate more smoothly and efficiently. The result will be a better use of taxpayers’ money. However, we will not be able to spend less money on education — at least not for now.”