Re S.A: Mr. H.I. Mandrin M.A.(Oxon). Come back, all is forgiven?

Ted_Bloke

Am I right or am I right that tax comes under a bunch of blokes called The Treasury, that once upon a time there was a thing called the British Civil Service, that the Treasury was the very top and holy of holies of the said Civil Service, which was all manned by discreet pin-striped gentlemen who had pursued arduous studies at Oxford in a thing called Greats, that as well as Latin and Greek excellent knowledge of English was also required of them, which was why they had to study at Oxford because that used to be the place where it was decided what English was and what was English? (A slight problem was that not everybody in the country always found this particular dialect easy to understand.)

But now the system has been opened up a bit. On the present SA online forms I found freestyle and laidback sentences like "Tax allowances and relief's have gone up;" and "We sent you a notice to complete a tax return on 06 Apr 2005." Perhaps users can find and post other examples?

I also thought that in a Civil Service something destined for diffusion by the million, written by one would be revised by another then controlled by his supervisor who submitted it to Buggins who had to approve its being forwarded to the Head of Thingy for preparation for consideration by Committee of so-and-so to initiate the proceedure for hierarchical passage that ended with someone who quakingly assured the Chancellor that it was all OK. So I am a bit surprised by such language getting through, and also guess my school made me into enough of a pedant for things like this to grate.

What do others think, has replacing the old 'Varsity products by the laureates of Nerdeley College of Technology been such an improvement?

I invite you to send you're comment's today (well I expect you know what I mean).

Stonk

It induces astonishment in me, too, that such lax communications issue from these bewilderingly overstaffed institutions where there surely ought to exist the resources to perform basic proofreading. I would be sufficiently happier if even that much could be done, before even considering the subject of vernacular usage.

One is led to wonder what the alumni of Nerdely Poly do all day.

Stonk, BA (Oxon) - but not Greats ...

WHA

Seen on various forms sent out by Govt bodies - apparently the second month of the year has been to changed to Febuary.

Savvy_Sue

There is of course a trend towards all communication from government departments being written in Plain English. I fear some people confuse this with colloquial English. I'm a fan of Plain English myself, but find it harder to write than it looks if I want to remain precise. All right, if I want to avoid any possibility of nit-picking! It's what happens when you are surrounded by pedants ...

WHA

It's a bit like the widespread use of standard letters -

things like

"if we can be of further help to you, please contact us"

When the letter has actually been of no help whatsoever, or even worse has actually been a "bad news" letter

sarahlouise210

Civil servants are actually not allowed to write a good letter any more! When I joined the CS I was praised for my letter writing - if I was to write the same letter today I would not meet my performance requirements. The whole system has gone mad ..we hate it and the public appear to hate it..however that is what management require. There is a difference between plain english and writing in a condescending manner. We are now expected to write without using even basic extended vocabulary - it is not easy when you have an A level in English!

CIS

I agree, we had no end of problems with 'better letters' on the section I was with.

To do what they asked required dumbing down to a level that insulted most people of even moderate intelligence.

In the end we decided to ignore it and keep writing letters exactly the same as we did previously, never ever had complaints about the quality or content.