The Official Style

Everything we've been talking about—obfuscation, nominalizations, the passive voice, long wordy constructions that muddy up questions of who did what—have been neatly labeled the Official Style by Richard Lanham, a well-known scholar and teacher of writing: "The Official Style comes in many dialects—government, military, social scientific, lab scientific, MBA flapdoodle—but all exhibit the same basic attributes. They all build on the same central imbalance, a dominance of nouns and an atrophy of verbs."

　　The Official Style is especially prevalent in bureaucracies, because their impersonality, rules, and formal procedures make expressions of individualism risky. Even when it's not really necessary for protection or camouflage, most people within large organizations who have to write serious professional stuff—laws, reports, policy statements, grant applications, police reports, and so on—automatically turn to the Official Style, with its pompous, windy, inert prose. Eventually it becomes a mindless habit. Here is an example from Maryland's Annotated Code of Law.

　　Any investigation, inquiry, hearing, or examination which the Board is empowered by law to hold or undertake may be held or undertaken by or before the majority of the members of the Board or its secretary, and the finding or order of members of the Board or the representative, when concurred in by the majority of the members of the Board, shall have the same force and effect as the finding or order of the whole Board. （Article 56, Section 497）

　　This is horrible writing. And that's not just my opinion. A few years ago the state of Maryland, trying to make its laws easier to understand, rewrote this very passage. It turns out to have a straightforward meaning:

　　A majority of the members then serving on the Board is a quorum.　　Darren C. Hackett, "Lawyers Toil for 2 Decades Trying to Break the Maryland Code," Washington Post （August 26, 1989）, p. B1.

　　So how come this plain statement was buried under so much claptrap? Probably because whatever committee of lawyers wrote the law was afraid that if they said it plainly they'd sound dumb and undignified—that people might even start doubting that "the law" is really so hard to understand, or that lawyers are so grand and necessary.

　　Students are no different than lawyers or bureaucrats. They don't want to expose themselves or sound dumb, either—and after all they've learned to associate status and learning with grandiose claptrap. So they write stuff like this to demonstrate, they hope, that they are smart, educated, and collegiate:

　　1. It is evident that interpersonal conflict is responsible for many organizational problems experienced by businesses.

　　2. Prospero is faced with the necessity of deciding whether to accept forgiveness for the actions of his brother or whether to remain in a state of hostility.

　　3. The role of women in households in medieval Europe was arrayed across a number of possibilities of increasing or decreasing activity and independence, depending on variables such as status, wealth, religion, or region.

　　4. Data collected and analyzed to test the hypothesis were seen to support the hypothesis.

　　It's hard to break away from this habit of wordy pontificating.

　　Here's a student displaying that elevated tone characteristic of the Official Style:

　　To satisfy her own need of hunger, she ate the bread.

　　Isn't there something a bit gravely silly about her own need of hunger?

　　To satisfy her hunger she ate the bread.

　　Good enough, but we can do even better in stripping the stuffiness away.

　　She was hungry, so she ate the bread.

　　A final revision gets to the heart of the Nuts and Bolts style: finding a stronger verb to carry more of the load.

　　She devoured the bread.

　　Students often protest that such radical revisions "change the meaning." In a sense, of course, they're right. The point of a good revision isn't to preserve every particle of the original passage, but to be true to the original's core intended meaning. Sometimes that requires scrupulously preserving a single word or detail; sometimes it can mean a more extensive rewrite, as in this example. The final revision deletes she was hungry because the verb devours implies as much. As writers gain confidence in their grasp of words, they become more willing to make these kind of high-quality revisions （which means that to become a stronger writer you need to read a lot, so you can see how other good writers use words）.

　　Students sometimes resist plainness because they're too eager to spill all their ideas right away. Here's a student who's done a lot of thinking on a topic, and tries to cram it all into a too-busy first sentence:

　　"Alien 3" is a fast-paced, emotionally tense film composed of a vast array of symbols and meanings which reflect the political debates concerning women's reproductive rights.

　　Her sentence bristles with nouns, adjective and adverbs. It has too many ideas going in too many directions at once. The solution is to simplify by cutting to the core of the argument.

　　"Alien 3" is a powerful allegory of the contemporary American debate about women's reproductive rights.

　　One change is easy to see: fast-paced, emotionally tense has been replaced with the more generic powerful, in order to focus attention on the main point, the film's allegorical function. Readers can't focus on everything at once, and a skillful writer should quietly guide the reader to where she wants the most attention paid. There will be time later on to discuss the film's qualities in detail.

　　The writer still needs to sharpen the sentence, in order to move from a topic （the debate about women's reproductive rights） to a thesis （what side in the debate she believes the movie takes）:

　　"Alien 3" is a powerful allegory of the growing threat to women's reproductive rights in contemporary America.

　　What's left is a short, crisp sentence that gets the argument going, squarely focused on the central argument.