thedanglingmodifier.co.uk

It has been a strenuous week. After writing about Frank Luntz I began to feel paranoid about distorted messages and not being able to understand the words anymore. And now I suspect my colleagues are trying to catch me out. Why else would they ask if I’ve “been sighted of a document”?

But I’m not alone, and knowing this has been a great comfort to me. People have been sending me anecdotes and quotes from their own editorial ordeals – hideous sentences cut and pasted from one email into another – so that I can commiserate.

Unemployment hit two million this week. So – let’s just call her ‘my contact’ in the unemployment service – my contact was emailed about the need to:

“build capacity amongst our people to deal with a range of BSPD issues from performance to planning to strategy.”

Acronymfinder couldn’t help; the only definition it found for BSPD was the ‘British Society for Paediatric Dentists’.

But may be the Government are going combine NHS dentistry with signing on as part of public sector reform. Unemployed dentists could check fellow claimants’ teeth on their fortnightly visits to the dole office. That ought to save the public purse a few quid, which means of course, all the more for the banks.

Whatever BSPD issues are, at least the people dealing with them can look forward to increased capacity “amongst” them. As if the capacity will sit in their office, perhaps at its own desk, join them for drinks after work but never actually be a part of any of them.

The thing is, when you work with people who use language like this it’s so easy to succumb, to fall into it, to start talking like they do, to start thinking in long vacuous sentences that have very little, if any, meaning.

You notice once you work in the public sector that when there is more than one of anything, it always comes in a range, raft or variety. It doesn’t take long before words like ‘embed’ become embedded in your consciousness.

And then you start making mistakes, writing badly – like they do – and really believing when you re-read it that it actually makes sense. Take the example of another editor friend of mine who works in the public sector. He wrote the sentence below and admitted to me that it was “already quite bad”.

“…a ‘community unit’ that is responsible for the annual community engagement action plan for the whole council, as well as a group of ‘community engagement champions’ that makes sure community engagement gets into service plans…”

What worried me was that he’d written such a long sentence. It was so long he didn’t even have enough room in the email to quote it all.

They’ve got him – the conspirators who laugh at editorial staff everywhere – they’ve got him. And he knows they have. He can’t even delude himself that his original sentence was good.

And to make matters worse – as if it could get worse than this – his client, someone in the public sector who talks about ‘heads-ups’, ‘synergies’ and ‘the direction of travel’ without any sense of irony at all – this someone had rewritten his sentence.

So, if you don’t understand my friend’s explanation of community units and community engagement champions, perhaps this rewritten version will make it clear:

“…a developing focus on joint area and locality community led planning, within a partnership based frameworks for community engagement and locality planning.”