Does Good English Still Matter?

by Robert Lonoke

A friend recently passed on to me a lengthy document that someone had sent to her. My friend is deeply involved in systems theory as it applies to the functioning of families. She was fascinated to find, in this document, that a similar theory was being used in economics.


1. The Problem
Intrigued, I started reading the 10,000-word piece. I got as far as page six and stopped. However fascinating the ideas were, I saw no point in continuing to try to decipher the badly written English. Virtually every paragraph contained mistakes of style, usage, or basic logic. Most of the time, you could figure out what the writer intended to say, but you had to work at it. And if you weren’t tripping over a cliché you were stumped by a bit of hard-core economics jargon.

To protect the anonymity of the writer and the source, I will say only that the document came from a very large international conglomerate, and was written by a person somewhere in the upper levels of management. It was carefully formatted and printed, and clearly intended for widespread official distribution.

Here are a few examples—all taken from page 6, where I stopped reading. Maybe I’m just being an editorial curmudgeon. You, dear Magellan’s Log reader, can decide: Do these mistakes matter? Does this kind of unskilled, inaccurate English at this high corporate level matter?


The decentralization march is occurring on multiple levels. The grease on the skids is free markets and a precipitous drop in communication costs….

1. How can decentralization exist as a march? How can a "march" occur on "multiple levels"? Of course, what the writer means is: "the expansion of decentralization..."
2. "The grease on the skids is free markets… and a precipitous drop…"? Grease = free markets + precipitous drop???

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The development of modern portfolio theory over that past fifteen years or so represented a significant leap in understanding of how capital markets work. However, equilibrium economics remain at the core of the theory….

1. The antecedent of "that" in "that past fifteen years" is a mystery. Maybe it was a page or two back, but at this point I no longer really cared.
2. "…a significant leap in understanding of how…" No. It’s either "a significant leap in THE understanding of how…", or "a significant leap in understanding how…"
3. "…equilibrium economics remain…" Nope: "…equilibrium economics remains…" Economics is an academic discipline and is grammatically singular even though it ends with "s".

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This is not to say that markets are not well functioning mechanisms….

"…well-functioning…" The hyphen is necessary unless the adverb ends in "ly". And of course "well-functioning" is itself a clumsy, unusual construction. Why not say "…mechanisms that function well"?

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Economists have long observed CAS without formally having a name to attach to it. Adam Smith called it the "invisible hand." The Austrian school of economics called it "subjectivism." No matter the moniker, a decentralized model better described markets….

1.The writer (clumsily) first says economists have been aware of CAS (which the writer earlier explained means "complex adaptive systems") without having "a name to attach to it."
2. "It"? Elsewhere in the paper the writer uses "CAS" followed by a plural verb. So here, is it "it" or "them"?
3. But then the writer goes on to give examples from the past where economists DID have a name for CAS. Of course, what the writer means is that the earlier economists didn’t really understand what they were in fact mis-naming.
4. "Moniker"? Not only is it slang, it’s slang from, oh, say, the era of the original Hardy boys books.

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For the better part of the past century, companies were organized in hierarchical fashion. Managers had whatever information there was and they essentially dictated the tasks that needed to be completed. Further, many of the industry’s value chain activities were done within the corporation….

1. "…in a hierarchical fashion…"
2. Not "essentially," but "basically."
3. "Value-chain." The hyphen is used for adjectival nouns when clarity is important. But then, maybe in this paper, we don’t need to worry about such things…

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The first reason relates to a change in corporate emphasis as the result in the evolution in the economy from capital to knowledge based.

Of course the whole sentence should be thrown out, but the least we can expect is the correct use of the suspensive hyphen: "…capital- to knowledge-based." And of course "evolution OF the economy."

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New Economy business is in a constant search for the "next big thing"—the killer application that will dismantle the status quo.

How, one must ask, can anyone or anything "dismantle" the status quo?

2. The Solution
So what's going on here?

Is this person a really bad writer? No, not especially bad. Certainly not compared to other academic, technical, and corporate writers.

There are two problems here:
1. Every writer need editings. Repeat: EVERY writer needs editing.
2. Many non-professional writers don't realize that they need editing.

Even Shakespeare needed editing. Boy, did he ever. And the fact that he didn't get much is an embarrassment evident on almost every page of the collected works. Even the great plays contain, well, putting it kindly, fluff. Ill- or insufficiently considered passages. Most productions of Hamlet include only about 60% of the printed text.

But editing doesn't mean (as many non-professional writers think it does) just cutting, deleting one's immortal prose.

There are two kinds of editing:
1. Substantive editing, and
2. Copy editing.

In the economics text I was carping about above, the writer was in serious need of a good copy editor. The points I was raising were all copy-edit points, problems of style, usage, grammar, logic. We all make mistakes like the ones I discussed. With time, practice, and good editing, a writer learns to minimize those mistakes, but they never entirely disappear.

Substantive editing is another matter entirely. The substantive editor doesn't worry about the textual details, which are the copy editor's domain. The substantive editor rather attempts to be the ideal reader, who grasps (or tries to grasp) what the writer is getting at, what points the writer wants to make, and then reacts to the text in a constructive manner. The good substantive editor is free with "attaboys" where he or she finds that the writer has succeeded especially well. But in problem passages, the good substantive editor is also liberal with question marks, "let's-talk's", and is not above the occasional "MEGO" ("my eyes glaze over") when the writer has gone especially far off-course (see Shakespeare, for example).

Back to the sample economics text: You'll note I said nothing about structure or overall content. That was because I thought the writer did have a good grasp of the subject and had created a good overall framework for presenting his topic. The reason I pounced on his work was because his copy-edit mistakes were so frequent and so glaring that they obscured the larger picture.

No doubt the author thinks of himself as a good writer. But he's not unlike the driver of a Ford Excursion (the world's largest SUV) who blithely makes his heavy way down the street with little subtlety or finesse, confident that he'll safely get where he wants to go. He gets there all right, but he's left a lot of disgruntled, confused drivers and pedestrians in his wake.*

*A good substantive editor would argue that this metaphor doesn't really work, saying, "How are confused readers like confused driver?" And I would (partially) grant the point, but I would argue back that I thought the force of the image (haughty, oblivious SUV driver = haughty, oblivious bad writer) would carry the day.

END

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