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The Complete Plain Words, titled simply Plain Words in its 2014 revision, is a style guide written by Sir Ernest Gowers, published in 1954. It has never been out of print. It comprises expanded and revised versions of two pamphlets that he wrote at the request of HM Treasury, Plain Words (1948) and ABC of Plain Words (1951). The aim of the book is to help officials in their use of English as a tool of their trade. To keep the work relevant for readers in subsequent decades it has been revised by Sir Bruce Fraser in 1973, by Sidney Greenbaum and Janet Whitcut in 1986, and by the original author's great-granddaughter Rebecca Gowers in 2014.

All the editions until that of 2014 were published by Her Majesty's Stationery Office (HMSO). The most recent is issued by an imprint of Penguin Books.

Background

The association of wordiness with bureaucracy has a long history. In the 14th century Geoffrey Chaucer, a prominent civil servant as well as a poet, urged the use of straightforward writing. Reviewing Plain Words in 1948, The Manchester Guardian quoted the French revolutionary Martial Herman writing in 1794:

The British civil service of the 19th and early 20th centuries had a reputation for pomposity and long-windedness in its written communications. In Little Dorrit in the mid-1850s, Charles Dickens caricatured officialdom as the "Circumlocution Office", where for even the most urgent matter nothing could be done without "half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical correspondence." By the 1880s the term "officialese" was in use, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as, "The formal and typically verbose language considered characteristic of officials or official documents".

left|thumb|[[Ernest Gowers in 1920]]

Sir Ernest Gowers, a senior civil servant, was among those who wished to see officialese replaced by normal English. In 1929 he remarked in a speech about the civil service, "It is said... that we revel in jargon and obscurity". During the Second World War, with the role of government greatly expanded, official communications proliferated, and in Gowers's view were full of "mistiness and grandiloquence". He called for a new style of official writing, friendly in tone and easy to understand. His views came to the notice of the head of the civil service, Sir Edward Bridges, permanent secretary to the Treasury. After Gowers retired from the civil service at the end of the war, Bridges asked him to write a short pamphlet on good writing, for the benefit of the new generation of officials. The Times Literary Supplement greeted the publication: "It may be hoped that in this more durable form the book's good influence will continue to spread: Civil Servants have not been alone in profiting from it in the past, nor should they be in the future." The book has remained in print, in its original and revised editions, ever since.

Between Gowers's prologue and epilogue there is a Digression on Legal English followed by chapters on The Elements, Correctness, Avoiding the Superfluous Word, Choosing the Familiar Word, Choosing the Precise Word, The Handling of Words, and Punctuation.

1973 revision by Bruce Fraser

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The 1954 text was reprinted seven times during Gowers's lifetime, and he made a number of amendments in the various impressions. Changing times in the 1960s meant that a substantial revision was needed if the book was to continue to fulfil its purpose. Gowers, fully occupied for a decade in making the first revision of Fowler's Modern English Usage, was unable to carry out the task; he died in 1966, a few months after the publication of the revised Fowler. Another retired senior civil servant, Bruce Fraser, was asked to revise The Complete Plain Words.

Fraser preserved Gowers's structure, and added three new chapters, the most important of which was titled "Some recent trends"; it covered the increasing prevalence of informality, and the influences of America, science, technology, economics, business, and personnel management. The final sections of the chapter were on "vogue words" and "modish writing". Fraser noted that though Gowers had said approvingly in 1954 that the use of the subjunctive was dying out, it was now, under the influence of American writing, making an unwelcome reappearance in English usage. In The Times, Dennis Potter said that the book remained "the happiest thing to come out of the Treasury". He praised Fraser for replacing Gowers's dated examples of officialese with modern specimens and updating the text to reflect current trends, but concluded:

The Fraser edition was reprinted in hardback three times between 1973 and 1983. Penguin published a paperback version in the UK in 1973, and in the US in 1975.

1986 revision by Sidney Greenbaum and Janet Whitcut

The third edition was commissioned not by the Treasury but by Her Majesty's Stationery Office, to mark its bicentenary. The revision was made not by an experienced public servant but by an academic and a lexicographer, Sidney Greenbaum, Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College, London and Janet Whitcut, formerly senior research editor of the Longman Dictionary. They chose to revise Fraser's 1973 version rather than starting from Gowers's original. Having two authors made it necessary to abandon Gowers's frequent use of the first person; Fraser had retained it, stating "...the reader may take it that 'I' means either 'Gowers agreed with by Fraser' or 'Fraser, confident that Gowers would agree with him'". With joint authors for the new edition, this could not be sustained, and the change from first person to impersonal removed some of the book's previous character. Rebecca Gowers objects that this approach "systematically depersonalise[s] the writing".

The new edition, in the same format as its two predecessors, is in blue cloth, with dust-jacket, and has 298 pages. A paperback version was issued by Penguin Books in 1987, and an American hardback edition was published in 1988 by Godine Publishing, Boston.

2014 revision by Rebecca Gowers

The last direct link between Plain Words and the public service was broken in 1996, when HMSO was dismembered under governmental privatisation policy. The 2014 edition of the book was published by Particular Books, an imprint of Penguin Books. It was printed on lower-weight paper and in a smaller format than its predecessors. The reviser was Rebecca Gowers, Ernest's great-granddaughter, a novelist and author of a non-fiction book about a Victorian murder. She begins the new edition with a twenty-page preface that includes a biographical sketch of Ernest Gowers and a history of the revisions after his death.

Unlike the three earlier revisers, Rebecca Gowers generally avoids merging her own comments with the original text. Her practice is to retain Ernest Gowers's remarks and append updated observations in a separate note. An example is the entry on the use of the noun "issue". The original words were:

To which the reviser has added:

Although Fraser, Greenbaum and Whitcut remained broadly faithful to Gowers's original structure and chapter headings, with some minor changes, Rebecca Gowers reverts to the original almost exclusively. The modernisations she introduces, such as the consideration of gender-neutral language, are incorporated into the chapters of the 1954 book.

See also

  • The Complete Plain Words (1954 UK copyright expired version) Note:UK Copyright allows 50 years after the death of the author Sir Ernest Gowers
  • Fowler's Modern English Usage
  • The Chicago Manual of Style
  • The Elements of Style
  • Hart's Rules
  • Practical English Usage

Notes

References

Sources

  • Text of 1954 first edition, fifth (amended) impression at Internet Archive.