A Clearing for Communication

Imagine that a certificate program in Plain Language has now been introduced. I confess I have mixed emotions about this. Encouraging more people to become proficient and to use Plain Language in communicating is a good thing. But gee whiz, do we really need a certificate program to do that? E.B. White and Miss Hall, a highly revered English teacher in the Des Moines public schools in the 1960s, would probably be laughing themselves silly if they were around. Isn’t it the job of English teachers everywhere to teach the value of plain language?

Now, I’m wondering:

• What forces work against plain language?  Inadequate instruction in writing? Haste in writing?
• Who writes confounding and confusing prose? Pompous academics? Unscrupulous marketers? Overly cautious lawyers?
• What will it take to require Plain Language in contracts, laws, regulations and user agreements? Political pressure from enough consumers and citizens?
• What actions can I and others take to promote the use of Plain Language?

If you have thoughts about any of these questions, please let me know.

Here’s a fascinating look at the Use of Superlatives in Cancer Research stories published in the JAMA Oncology. Reporters, take care. Consumers, beware.

This New York Times op-ed piece, A Texas History Lesson, by Ellen Bresler Rockmore, a lecturer in the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric at Dartmouth, exposes how some Texas history books blunt the cruelty and ugliness of slavery.  Well worth a read.

“Monopsony” wins hands down for today’s title. Used in “How Book Publishers Can Beat Amazon,” “monopsony” is defined in the enlightening piece by Bob Kohn as when a buyer of goods has the power to unlawfully lower the prices of what it buys. “Monopsony” is the mirror image of “monopoly,” which is when a seller of goods has the power to unlawfully raise prices. Seems to me we have a lot of situations these days that sure feel like monopolies and monopsonies. Take the airline industry, which has three or four major carriers that keep finding new ways to wrest money from their customers. And Walmart, which seems to control its suppliers perhaps more than it should. Anyone up for creating a game called “Monopsony”? 

How high can we go? “Zettabyte” is a recently invented term to describe an extremely large amount of digital data, according to James Gorman in an article, All Circuits are Busy. A zettabyte equals about a trillion gigabytes or 75 billion 16-gigabyte iPads. Wow. And I thought a million was unfathonable. Photo by Eyewire

Am still catching up with Sunday’s paper. The story, “Loss Leaders on the Half Shell,” about the current oyster craze, captured my attention today even though I am not a fan of oysters, raw or otherwise.  The writer, Karen Stabiner, quoted a Chicago restaurateur as saying about certain oysters: “They’re coming from great growers who are developing their own terroir, like wine growers.” Unfamiliar with the word, I raced to Webster’s New World Dictionary but it wasn’t there. A Google search immediately turned up a definition: “The conditions in which a food is grown or produced and that give the food its unique characteristics: grass-fed beef with an Idaho terroir.” Of course, I should have known, given that terre means earth. A search of the New York Times also turned up at least six previous uses of the word in the past two years. Where have I been? Oh, well, now I know. It’s a great word and will surely come in to more popular use given that all sorts of foods these days are marketed based on their terroir.