Saving Lives or Sheltering Minds?

Saving Lives or Sheltering Minds?

“Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten” - George Orwell, 1984

For those of you who are unfamiliar with this part of George Orwell’s book “1984”, this quote is discussing a dystopian world’s new language called “newspeak”. Newspeak is a language that is extremely oversimplified and made more plain. This is the required language that the characters working for the government must use. In the book, this is done in order to control the thoughts of the citizens by not allowing them even the vocabulary to challenge the practices of the government. 

This might make you worried when you think about the Plain Writing Act put into place by the US government in 2010. This law states, “An act to enhance citizen access to Government information and services by establishing that Government documents issued to the public must be written clearly, and for other purposes.” 

Having this dystopian governmental censorship shadowing behind a real law put into place by our government today, should make you feel a little uneasy and raise some questions. 

Should we all be cautious of using the Plain Style in our writing?

Furthermore, are there any situations where we should expect the government to communicate by strictly using the Plain Style?

While I can not with a good conscience try to convince you that George Orwell’s dystopian society would never be a possibility for our own world, I do argue that the Plain Style is sometimes a necessity.

The Plain Style is supposed to make writing simple enough for the vast majority of people to be able to understand. This would displace the eliestest complex that we often see used by people in academia or government agencies in order to exclude people. The Plain Style functions on the idea that everyone should be able to understand what they are trying to read, and that the author should be held accountable if they are writing to take advantage of the audience's lack of understanding. With this understanding of the Plain Style of writing, we can acknowledge that there are situations in which we should hold the people in power accountable to provide us with information we can understand. 

 One example where writing in the Plain Style is needed, is when universities were giving safety instructions and guidelines to students during the COVID19 pandemic.

Chancellor Rebecca Blank at the University of Wisconsin Madison was able to use the Plain Style of writing effectively to relay safety measures to her student body about the virus. In her public announcement she uses aspects of the Plain Style such as active voice, personal pronouns, concrete and familiar words, and even breaks up her instructions into short lists.

By following these aspects of the Plain Style, the student body reading her guidelines would be able to not only understand what is being said but also easily follow her safety advice. 

As we can see, this use of the Plain Style is actually used to protect people rather than take advantage of them, as was the idea of Orwell’s “newspeak”. This shows that the Plain Style can do more than just shelter our minds.

Grace Oliver