• Macquarie Home »
• Faculty of Human Sciences »
• Department of Linguistics »
• Centres and Groups »
• Style Council

STYLE COUNCIL 2004

Report by Rosemary Noble

The 'hamburgerisation' of Australian English was the way that Lex Icon, from the Society of Pure English (SOPE), aka comedian Rodney Marks, described the current state of Australian language at the opening of Style Council 2004 (we were in the McDonalds Room of the State Library of NSW after all). His amusing browse through the conference program gave him the ammunition he needed to demonstrate our love of buzzwords. Liberally sprinkling his ramblings with such gems as knowledge management, scenario planning, value propositions and corporate governance, he well and truly set the scene for the two days of input, throughput and output leading to a holistic totality on public and professional discourse—yes, really!

The overall theme of the conference was Public and Professional Discourse, with reference to Don Watson's book, Death sentence: the decay of public language (Sydney, Knopf, 2002). The keynote speaker, Neil James of the Plain English Foundation, while not totally agreeing with Watson, did concede that public discourse was definitely not healthy. Symptoms of the poor health of 'officialese' include the use of poor narrative structures, plenty of passive voice and an abundance of Latinate words. Did you know, for example, that Latinate words comprise about 22 per cent of everyday English language, but generally there are more than 50 per cent of them to be found in officialese?

The subsequent speakers, exploring this theme from a wide variety of angles, included politicians, journalists, lawyers, academics, business writers and editors. NSW state government politician Andrew Tink gave us examples of political speak to demonstrate that public language has been used for centuries by those in power to attack, defend and criticise. At the same time politicians use this language to avoid risky commitment by boring and stupefying the reader with jargon and waffle.

Other presenters drew our attention to the shifting meanings of words. Heather Forbes, ABC news journalist, talked of how words such as 'terrorist' can be used to manipulate the perceptions of the audience by legitimising one side of a conflict and demonising the other. Alan Jones from Macquarie University talked of ecospeak and greenwash—the practice of giving products an implicit association with the natural environment to soften their image. He gave examples of big business (i.e. oil companies) using terms that were vague (disposable, biodegradable), polysemous (development, growth, resources) or just plain misleading (spillage, labour-saving), to ensure 'strategic ambiguity'.

Other highlights included:

• the panel discussion that centred around the contentious statement that 'all prose can be improved by a good editor'. Panellists were Bruce Heilbruth (Businesswriters), Pamela Hewitt (NSW Society of Editors) and Bill Krebs ( Bond University )
• the experiences of best-selling children's author Matthew Reilly, when he agreed to publish his sixth novel, Hover car racer, online with free downloads, before the print version became available
• a comparison of the different levels of language used in court by the various protagonists—police to suspect, lawyer to client, judge to jury, counsel to witness, and so on—presented by Roland Sussex of the University of Queensland
• some interesting discussions based on the language of research theses, firstly by Janet Mackenzie on the recently ratified policy on editing theses developed by the Council of Australian Societies of Editors (CASE) and the Deans and Directors of Graduate Studies (D-DOGS); then by a panel of academics from the University of South Australia who have set up a pilot program to work with research students to improve their writing skills.

So what, if any, solutions were offered, in order to stem the tide of jargon, waffle, clichés and other distracting verbiage? Encouragement to use editors (hurray!), advocacy of the Plain English movement, even the re-introduction of the study of classical rhetoric and critical thinking, were suggested. For those of us whose livelihood revolves around words, Style Council 2004 proved once again to be a must to attend and a timely reminder to make each word count.

 << Back

[Back to top]