“Local councils have been warned over a slew of jargon that baffles ordinary people, but why do they love to obfuscate?”
Erm, well, the sad fact is by and large councils don’t love to obfuscate; it’s in nobody’s interest to.
Now of course there’s no denying that jargon does get out to the public, and sometimes the person writing a document genuinely forgets that the word footway is not generally the word most people use for the pavement. But by and large, most councils do go to great lengths to try to ensure that what they are sending out to the public is written in easy to read, plain english.
But wait ! Reading deeper into this article, it becomes apparent that what it is criticising is not communication with the general public, but technical communication between council staff, or communication between technical council staff and technical people in external agencies.
It then goes on to further make its point by presenting a list of technical words used in technical documents with their translations:
- Predictors of beaconicity – What makes councils good
- Coterminosity – Having same boundaries
- Improvement levers – the tools to get the job done
- Place-shaping – creating places where people can thrive
- Revenue stream – money/income
- Slippage – delay
- Holistic governance – taking everything in
- Stakeholder – organisation, or occasionally person, with a stake in the success of something
- Synergy – thing working better when done together
- Transformational – to do with change
- Best practice – right way to do things
- Bottom-up – based on ordinary people
- Community engagement – getting ordinary people involved
- Subsidiarity – the principle by which something should be done locally unless it is better done at a higher level of government
And this does somewhat undermine the article’s argument.
A document using all of the technical words once in it would amount to 21 words. Using the translated versions puts the word count up to 82 – and that’s only with the words used once per document.
Plain english is as much about brevity as it is about using words people understand the meaning of.