W hat is Plain English?

headed reader will anyway protest mentally But the church spire is not
glancing to the right. In the same way, having read As the inheritor of
an illustrious name in hunting, the threat to the sport came as a great
shock, the grammarian will quite properly talk about misconnecting an
appositional phrase, but the clear-headed reader can see anyway that it
is nonsense to talk o f a threat as having an illustrious name in hunting,
and will not need to refer to the grammatical rule book. Correct use of
English depends so m uch on straight thinking and sheer com m on sense
that it is possible in discussion o f the subject to be selective and economic
in the use of grammatical terminology. That is the policy in this book.
Some light can be shed on w hat constitutes plain English if we take a
preliminary look at a few o f the obvious qualities it m ust have. Utterance
that is plain is utterance that cannot be misunderstood. And utterance
that cannot possibly be m isunderstood will be precise. To be precise is
to get exactly the right word. Precision ought not to be regarded as
the preserve of pedants. Getting nearly the right w ord renders prose
uncomfortable for the educated reader. Here w e have an advertisement
w here a touch of cleverness misfires through failure to be precise.
Five Alive, one of the most popular fruit drinks on the market, has devel
oped a new tasty recipe thats an ideal accompaniment for any breakfast
table.
Reading w ith proper attention, we sense at once that the w ord accom
panim ent is ill-chosen. Tomato sauce m ight be a suitable accompaniment
for fish and chips, and a piano m ight provide a suitable accompaniment
for a singer, but a breakfast table does not need to be accompanied by a
recipe. The w riters desire not to say the simple and direct thing, that
the recipe makes a tasty drink for breakfast, instead o f dragging in the
notion of accompanying a table, merely makes for imprecision.
Plain English is never wasteful o f words. If a thing can be said briefly,
then so it should be. Great poets recognize this. Few sentences say as
m uch as Shakespeares To be or not to be; that is the question. Not that
compression so extreme fits all occasions. But the pointless piling-up of
words degrades the w ords it wastes. Nevertheless, the notion that brief
conversational idioms should be translated in print into long-w inded
utterance is widespread. Here is a report on the result o f a test taken by
nurses.