Fancy, flowery, and official language

- One big thing that stands in the way of simplicity in your writing is fancy or flowery language when simple things are stated in a pointlessly fancy way. Now, by fancy language, I don't mean language that's colorful and evocative, and that helps to get your meaning across in an interesting or stimulating way. I'm talking about pointlessly fluffy and long-winded ways of saying things that make your writing basically slow and heavy. To avoid this kind of pointlessly flowery language, say what you wanna say in as simple a way as possible, and then spice it up as necessary if you need to afterwards. Look at this sentence which illustrates fancy writing on the website of the plain English writing campaign. I think it's called the Plain English Campaign. High-quality learning environments are a necessary precondition for the facilitation and enhancement of the ongoing learning process. You've probably come across such writing in government reports or in internal communications. There's the assumption that professional writing needs to sound somehow different, more official than ordinary writing. And that idea does tremendous damage to people's growth as competent writers. I'd advise you to shun such pretentious writing in almost every context, because it doesn't really help your communication at all, unless of course, you deliberately want to hide something. With writing like this, it's as if there's something more, a more concrete idea hidden in the weeds of the sentence that's struggling to get out. Now the reason it feels like that is because it's just simply not plain enough. Where the meaning doesn't hit you instantly, your communication is really falling short. If I was confronted with a sentence like this as an editor, I'd straightaway begin looking for what the specific idea is that's yearning to get out of this horrible abstraction. And I'd look for the plainest way possible of saying it. Now, my advice to avoid this kind of pointlessly long-winded language could really have gone into any of the sections of this course, because it's so bad stylistically. Apart from not being simple, it isn't terribly clear either because it's just so abstract. It definitely isn't elegant either. Just look at the sentence. It's ugly as anything, right? And it certainly isn't stimulating to read, because it doesn't create any pictures for the reader. It's just a lot of dry words. So it's not evocative either. In other words, this sort of fancy language fails to deliver on all aspects of beauty. Now let's say you discover this kind of sentence in your own writing, right? High-quality learning environments are a necessary precondition for facilitation and enhancement of the ongoing learning process. Getting to the habit of deconstructing things like that, and then stating them much more plainly, it will bring a breath of fresh air of simplicity to your writing, because believe it or not, abstract, bureaucratic, and unnecessarily official writing remains a very common practice. The good news is that you really can distinguish yourself massively just by focusing on fixing this particular bad tendency. So let's ask what might the writer be really trying to say here? High-quality learning environments, let's break it down, right? Now, what exactly does learning environments actually mean? How could we express that in a more plain way? Could the writer be talking about schools? This does seem to be the case here. So let's assume it's schools that the writer is really talking about in this sentence. What would high-quality mean in that context? It seems to me just a fancier way of saying good schools, right? So the next one, are a necessary precondition, we're just breaking it down further. Is there a clearer way, a more concrete way, of saying that? How about just are needed? If we use that, then so far, we'll have good schools are needed. Now what's next? For facilitation and enhancement. Can you think of a more simple way of saying that? Well, how about to improve, or to enhance, or to support? The word facilitation actually seems a little bit pointless in that sentence anyway. So I personally think that the word support captures the meaning best of the sentence. And that gives us this, good schools are needed to support. So you see how we've gone from the abstraction down to something much more straightforward and plain. What's next? Of the ongoing learning process. Now to me, all that just means, is learning. So then we get good schools are needed to support learning. Now that we've unmasked the idea to some extent, we can actually begin to evaluate it properly, right? And to be honest, it's a pretty weak idea beneath all that sophistry. It wasn't all that easy to see how weak it was. Good schools are needed to support learning. Now it might be helpful to mention children, I think, or students somewhere in the sentence, because those are the people actually being talked about as benefiting from education in that sentence. So we could state the whole sentence more plainly like this, good schools are needed to support children's learning. Now on the Plain English Campaign's website, the solution offered turns the sentence around a bit to say children need good schools if they're to learn properly. Now either way, you can now understand why the original sentence took us so long to comprehend. Just imagine having to read sentence after sentence laden with this type of bureaucratic language. It really wouldn't be that pleasant of an experience, would it? So whenever you come across sentences that aren't plain, immediately start deconstructing them to see, first of all, if there's a substantial point actually being made in all that bureaucratic language. And if there is, then go on to try and simplify it into the plainest language possible without making it sound perhaps too colloquial or slangy.