A Letter Nobody Can
Read
To build a pipeline to transport
crude oil across the United States, or not to, is the question at hand. This question is surrounded by a complex web
of human activities that play out in economics, politics, law, and social and
environmental activism. Out of this
complex array of human interaction came an attempt to help answer this question
in the following document, published on the Environmental Protection Agency’s
website. Here is a link to that
document: http://www.epa.gov/compliance/nepa/20140032.pdf
To boil it down, the letter
addresses a previously published document by The State Department concerning
the environmental impact the Keystone XL pipeline would have on the environment
were it to be built. The letter is
written by Cynthia Giles, assistant administrator of the EPA, and is addressed
to Amos Hochstein and Judith Garber, both members of the State Department. The letter is also indirectly addressed to
the public; it can be found by anyone on the EPA’s website. And here is where the letter’s pros style can
be called into question.
As can be seen by reading the
opening sentence, the letter is written in the official style: “In accordance
with our authorities under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and
Section 309 of the Clean Air Act, EPA has reviewed the Department of State's
(Department) Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS)…”, and on
and on, to form an ever elongating string of prepositional phrases and
conjunctions.
What member of the general public, who on average read at a 7th
grade level, would take the time to struggle through a document this hard to
read? The answer is, very few. So it seems as if the public nature of this
document is being undermined by the fact that it is written in the official
style. Let’s take a look at some further
examples.
First, in bold lettering, we have an example of
nominalization, when a verb is changed into a noun to make the action sound
extremely important: “The Department has also strengthened the analysis of oil spill prevention preparedness…”. The author could have written, “…being
prepared to prevent an oil spill…”, but instead uses this awkward phrase to
sound important at the expense of alienating less adept readers.
Second, we have an example of metonymy, “a figure
of speech in which a thing or concept is
called not by its own name but rather by the name of something associated
in meaning with that thing or concept.” (Wikipedia). In this case, the use of metonymy obscures
the source of the document (who are the authors?): “Nonetheless, the Final SEIS acknowledged that the proposed pipeline does present
a risk of spills, which remains a concern for citizens and businesses relying
on groundwater resources crossed by the route.” This is a silly use of words, since people
know that inanimate objects like documents don’t acknowledge; cognizing people
acknowledge. By using metonymy, the authors
remain hidden and it becomes very difficult to find out who is taking what
position on an argument—something important for the general public to know
about the people directly affecting policy.
Lastly, the concepts in the document are very abstract. Unless the reader is already familiar with the
jargon, much of the meaning of the text is lost. For example, a term like, “wells-to-wheels”
is so abstract that entire books are written on the subject, yet in the letter,
the term is mentioned without any explanation.
So, it can be seen that even though this letter is available
to the public, only a few comprehend it.
The text’s meaning becomes obscured by long sentences, official sounding
language, authors who hide behind figures of speech like metonymy, and abstract
concepts that are never explained, just dropped for others in the know to pick
up on.
In order for me to cut
through this cloud of information and understand what the letter was talking
about, I had to turn to some outside sources for clarification. For example, a google search on the Giles’s
letter led me to this article in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/04/us/politics/epa-review-of-keystone-pipeline-notes-potential-rise-in-greenhouse-gases.html?_r=0
I
imagine it is through sources like online newspapers, rather than the EPA’s
website, that many individuals heard about Cynthia Giles’s letter. When comparing the pros style of the NY Times
article with the actual letter itself, it is easy to see why this might be: the
Times article is much easier to comprehend.
It uses much shorter sentences, less abstract language, and it clearly contextualizes
the letter. Luckily there are avenues
like this where information is synthesized into much more comprehensible bits!
I
also found a number of blogs with posts referring to the letter. Here is an example of a blog geared towards
the environmentally conscious: http://www.scoop.it/t/western-liner.
The commentary provided by the blog seems very optimistic about the
letter’s abilities to sway policy makers away from constructing a
pipeline. This may be true, but it
should be read critically, since the bloggers themselves might have an agenda
and therefore the commentary could have a bias.
It was just as easy to find articles online that used Giles’s letter to
support their argument for building a pipeline: http://keystone-xl.com/transcanada-sends-letter-to-state-department-addressing-epa-comments/.
The above link is to TransCanada’s website. TransCanada is the corporation that wants to
build the pipeline, so it’s no wonder they have a very different interpretation
of Giles letter.
Ideally, anyone concerned with the construction of the
Keystone XL Pipeline could just read the document firsthand on the EPA’s
website and know exactly what was meant by the author. But a text’s meaning is never that
precise. Rather than being a bridge, a
text is often a gap between the author and the audience and in many cases the
official style widens this gap by obscuring the texts meaning even
further. A reader is apt to get lost in
the lengthy sentences of official style, so that even before finishing a
sentence they have forgotten what it is about.
In the case of Cynthia Giles letter, the official style is a
gap between the people who communicate with it--the policymakers and heads of
corporations--and those who don’t communicate with it and don’t even understand
it—and these people are often the ones who are directly affected by the policy
maker’s decisions.
There are some cases in which some elements of the official
style are useful. For example, in the
sciences, the use of jargon is actually an efficient shorthand for extremely
complex and abstract concepts. Whether
or not a reader can arrive at an understanding of these concepts without the
official style is a difficult question.
I’m not sure every concept in humanities and sciences can be explained
at a 7th grade reading level.
Sometimes it may be necessary for the reader to really struggle with a
text in order to gain understanding.
But this letter. In
it, the official style is used mostly as a formality—a way for bureaucrats to
talk to other bureaucrats. If the
pipeline were to be built, it most likely wouldn’t directly affect these
people. It would directly affect the
land owners, farmers and native tribes who live right where the pipeline is
plotted. And if anyone, it’s these
people that the official style excludes.
So I have to wonder, what good is a letter to the public if it can’t be understood
by them?
Sam Petersen
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