Writing in Plain English
“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. They enshrine the triumph, worshipped in every bureaucracy, of stasis over action. This basic imbalance is easy to cure, if you want to cure itand this book’s Paramedic Method tells you how to do it. But when do you want to cure it? We all sometimes feel, whatever setting we write in, that we will be penalized for writing in plain English. It will sound too flip. Unserious. Even satirical. In my academic dialect, that of literary study, writing plain English nowadays is tantamount to walking down the hall naked as jaybird.” (p. 2)