The type of English to avoid in 2014

With 2013 drawing to an end, I'm sure people will be far to engrossed in their festivities to bother with advice on points of written English. Instead, I thought I'd take examples of real-life phrases taken from legal documents in English; these exemplify exactly the type of language I try to encourage people to avoid. They actually come from translations from Russian into English by native English speakers, but they're overly literal and horribly stilted. In the New Year, I'll post more advice and techniques to help people not to write like this.

Ten New Year quotations

So it's nearly New Year, and towards the end of the current year I've been a little slack with this blog. Work and the Christmas celebrations have ensured I haven't posted for more than a couple of weeks. I'll try to be a little more conscientious in the New Year, but in the meantime I'll add a couple of posts to end 2013. The first of them has a seasonal theme in that I've just been online for some quotations with a New Year theme and have picked a random selection of ten that appealed to me.

Don’t leave me hanging on

Participles are verb forms ending in -ing or -ed and used adjectivally are called participles. Writers need to use them with care, or there is a risk that unintended comedy may result as a result of what is often called a ‘hanging participle’ or ‘dangling participle’.

Do the –ise or the –ize have it?

The basic rule is that the verb ending –ize is an indicator of American English while the form –ise is British. However, it isn’t quite as simple as that.

2-4-6-8 hypenate?

With many points of grammar and style in English, it’s fairly easy to detect a trend if you read enough texts by educated native speakers with good writing skills. This isn’t the case, however, with the hyphen, so I thought I’d offer a few comments in case people are confused.

20 polite phrases the British use in correspondence, and what we really mean

This post may make a rod for my own back. After all, I use many if not all of the phrases I mention in it in my everyday correspondence. Now people will know my secrets!

Nonetheless, I’ve always believed that the British are usually pretty good at this type of thing. In this post, therefore, I list twenty commonly used phrases. I’ve added a helpful English to English translation to help you to deploy them properly.

It's all relavtive

Legal writing often involves a need to talk about how something relates to something else. And there are lots of phrases to help us do this when we draft legal texts.

If the wrong prepositions are used when these phrases are deployed, readers are likely to understand even so. Nonetheless, writing sounds more authoritative if you use the right ones, and generally that’s a quality that clients are pleased to perceive in their lawyers.

A duty to give reasons?

In some cases under English law, a decision-maker may be under a public law duty to give reason for any decision it takes. I’ve been a government lawyer, so have direct experience of jumping through hoops to make sure that no one has a real prospect of success should they rush off to court to challenge your actions on the grounds that they are unfair, fundamentally unreasonable (‘irrational’, as the case law puts it) or not taken for the proper legal reasons.

Of course, the work I do now is rather different and clearly I have no formal legal obligation to specify why I edit in a particular way. Nonetheless, when I revise legal texts in English, I consider that I should often try to explain myself.

Is everything under control?

People who study languages will be aware of the concept of the ‘false friend’, a word that may mean one thing in your own language but which, when used in another language, means something completely different. Occasionally these can be amusing: for instance, a Frenchman may be slightly bemused when foodstuffs are advertised in the UK as having no preservatives (i.e. no additives whose purpose is to delay the food in turning bad). ‘Why would one even think of adding preservatives?’ our hypothetical French friend may muse. In French, you see, a ‘préservatif’ is a condom.

I suspect that more of a problem, at least in legal drafting in English but relating to a foreign system of laws, is a word that has the same meaning but somehow doesn’t quite fit exactly. One of those words for documents produced in Russia is ‘control’.

An example of Runglish

When I was in my early years at secondary school, the humorist Miles Kington produced a series of popular books based on his magazine columns in which he expounded on Franglais, a mix of French and English (e.g. “Kington présente 40 lessons hilarieux en des situations d'everyday "). Anyone who deals with English texts in Russia will encounter Runglish, a similar phenomenon but formed from Russian and English.

Common in this context are Russian grammatical structures that are otherwise alien to good written English but which take root in business writing in English about Russia. One such construction, in the context of a company’s directors or shareholders passing a formal corporate resolution, is ‘resolution on …’ or ‘to resolve on …’

10 expressions with their roots in the glorious game of cricket

Cricket. It’s a game that is incomprehensible to many and is regarded as boring by some. On the other hand I, in the words of the song by 10CC, love it. How can anyone with a soul not adore a game in which the players break for tea? Where after heated battle for six hours a day over five days, they pack up to go home with no decisive result at all, merely shaking hands and saying, “Good show, chaps. It’s a draw!” This, it strikes me, is the height of Englishness.

Today, battle was resumed in international cricket’s oldest rivalry: over in Brisbane, Australia and England started a series of matches over the next few weeks for The Ashes. I won’t go into detail about exactly what this means, but for me it’s a BIG DEAL. And so, instead, I’ll bring you a few phrases that have passed into the English language (or at least the British version of it) courtesy of this engagingly eccentric sport.

The single word that exemplifies everything I most loathe in legal English

As Richard Wydick, the author of the book Plain English for Lawyers, notes, lawyers “use eight words to say what could be said in two. We use arcane phrases to express commonplace ideas. Seeking to be precise, we become redundant. Seeking to be cautious, we become verbose.” I think he’s right, and there’s one word above all that I regard as a bellwether for these trends. That word, guaranteed to send me into paroxysms of unrestrained fury every time I see it, is “hereinafter”.

Defend or protect?

Sometimes it’s hard to choose the right word in a language that isn’t your own; you aren’t quite sure of all the nuances that different options reflect. This is all the more so when a single word in your language can be rendered by two different words in your target language, as is the case with ‘defend’ and ‘protect’ in English, both of which often translate the Russian verb ‘защищать’.

20 phrases in English that were made popular by Shakespeare

One of the best ways for anyone looking to write English which is more natural, readable and lively to achieve their objective is to use idioms. Of course this isn’t much use when drafting complex contractual documentation, but in other contexts – even corresponding with clients – it’s not only tolerable but even recommended.

The individual who invented or popularised more phrases that are still used in modern English than anyone else is William Shakespeare. His impact on the language in this regard was quite extraordinary, and is well worth a closer look.

The lawyer in me

I generally advise people not to get too hung up if they have to work with legal texts. In my opinion, good English is good English, whether it’s used in legal writing or in a sports report. Nonetheless, there’s one aspect of working with legal texts that lawyers, editors and translators need to take on board, and that’s the need to be faithful in preserving the original or intended meaning of any text you’re modifying. This was brought home to me recently by one of my favourite language resources.

Do as I do or do as I say? The role of the legal editor

When I edit legal texts (and, as we’ve previously noted, I use this term advisedly), my primary objective is to produce a document that reads as though it could have been written by a native English-speaking lawyer. However, I strongly believe that an editor who works with non-native speakers has another important role, and that’s to set a good example to the people whose work you edit. People assume that you, as a native speaker, produce English that they can imitate.

A note on swearing

In discussing matters falling within its scope, this blog aims where possible to use everyday, modern British English. Everyday, modern British English sometimes features swearing.

What I do and what I don’t do

At work, I regularly receive requests to look over documents and sometimes they’re phrased in a way that really gets my back up. Sometimes the offending formulation appears even in the title of the email containing the request, making me ill-disposed to the task before I even know what it is.

How to avoid confusion when terminology may be ambiguous

Legal writing in English can sometimes confuse readers because different items of legal terminology can sometimes be ambiguous. Here I take a look at some of those and suggest ways to avoid problems.

A note on British and American English

In this blog, I’ll be using British English. This is for the simple reason that I’m British. I’m not interested in offering partisan arguments about what may be the best form of English; in cases where British and American usage differs, the American version is probably to my preference at least as often as the British.

The difference between the relative pronouns ‘that’ and ‘which’

Relative clauses in English (i.e. those which modify a preceding noun, noun phrase or pronoun) are introduced by a relative pronoun – either ‘that’ or ‘which’, depending on the circumstances.

This blog: what it’s all about, and the one thing I want to stress above all

Having decided to make a serious effort with this blog, I thought I should start off by saying a few words about what I’m seeking to achieve by producing it. In one sense, that’s easy: it does exactly what it says on the tin, in that it deals with legal English in a Russian context. But the how and the why also deserve some explanation.