And here's the background: Some trees were marked to be cut down on a street in Sirsi. A few of us started asking questions to the municipality and the forest department. We were passed from one to the other until we were told that the forest department knew nothing about the decision to cut these trees down. As the trees were on municipal property, it was the municipality’s decision to do so.
A friend filed the RTI application and received this document. As it shows, the forest department knew very well about the proposed tree cutting. It has even made arrangements for the timber to be carried to its depot.
While the double-speak is one part of the issue, what caught my eye, or shall I say, jammed my eye, is this gargantuan sentence-paragraph made up of 60 words! Why write like this? Isn't it tiring to write, let alone read?
Perhaps the simplest and the most necessary first step in plain language translation is to break down monster paragraphs like these into human sentences.
The more I think about why we write like this, it seems to me there's an implied understanding that it's not really written to be understood. It's not written to express meaning. It is simply carried out as a chore. The human need to communicate has long gone missing. This is mostly always true of government communication, aka bureaucratese, but we see such examples all around us, all too often.
Have you come across bureaucratese or officialese recently? I can't say I'll be happy to know, but feel free to vent.
