For the sake of effective communication, English, as well as any other languages, should be plain. Unfortunately, it was and still is very fashionable for many writers to use a very bloated, rambling style. To illustrate, just recall how many times you were irritated, or might be frustrated by the uses of obsolete vocabulary, unnecessary borrowed words, exuberant wordy phrases, long and complex sentences with subordinate clauses following several tangents that could take up half a page.

Anecdote has it that the philosopher G.W.F Hegel could write sentences that easily occupied more than three pages. Perhaps this tradition have originated with classical Latin, in which such prose was perfectly acceptable.

As William Strunk Jr noted, such an extravagant (in fact bad and presumptuous) style is useless and even detrimental to effective communication. He actively promoted the idea of writing in plain English1. Although William Strucnk Jr clearly wasn't the first advocator of plain English, consider Abraham Lincoln's plain yet elegant style in Gettysburg Address2, it would take over fifty years for Strunk's ideas to become widely accepted. The plain English revolution finally penetrated the fields of law and government during the 1970s, as shown by the passage of the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1976, and the popularity of books like Plain English for Lawyers (1979).

askoxford.com has an online tutorial called "Better Writing", comprising a seperate section on "Plain English", and is a good starting point to train yourself as a excellent plain English user. At the website of U.S. Securities and Exchange Commision, you can find an 83-page pdf format document, "A Plain English Handbook - How to create clear SEC disclosure documents", the preface of which was written by Warren E. Buffett -- yes, he is absolutely one of those who know better the very value of plain English.

It's necessary for ESL students to strive for an elegant style of plain English, not only because it is crucial to effectively communicate with anybody, anytime, anywhere, but also because by learning an effective style, students have the opportunity to shorten the otherwise long and tedious foreign language learning process.

Posted: November 20th, 2008 | Author: xiaolai