Plain English in education

A disclaimer before I start: this blogpost is based on my own experience in education, and I’ve no idea how representative it is.

My own worst work

The other day, while doing my once-yearly check-in of an old Hotmail account, I stumbled across my degree dissertation. I’d written it in 2006 as part of a law degree at University College London (UCL).

Because I’m not easily embarrassed, here’s the opening couple of paragraphs:

“Medical ethics have only fairly recently been brought to the forefront of jurisprudential debate. Although it is fair to say that the first written articulations of feminist doctrine came late into the nineteenth century, it is also reasonable to presume that this was not the very beginnings of feminism — and equally, one should not see the mid to late twentieth century as the beginnings of bioethics.

When these two schools of thought are catalysed together, we are left with a residue of analysis whereby feminists display their objections to the medical profession mainly through their opposition to patriarchy, and the fact that doctors cannot understand the intricacies of the female body. The medical profession is quintessentially considered male-led, hence the word ‘paternalism’ can be applied to this field of the law in the same way that the law generally faces critiques of substituting its own judgment and expertise for wellbeing — mentally, physically or otherwise — of the subject in question.”

Oh my god, it’s bad. What a load of flowery, unnecessarily wordy fluff. The worst thing is that I thought it was really well written at the time. Or maybe it’s worse that I got a first for it (the fools) (humblebrag).

I’ve started to trace back how 15 years of education led me to a point where writing like that felt natural.

Being taught how to write

Back when I was about 13 or 14, I remember my English teacher telling me things like:

• “Natalie, don’t use the words ‘good’ or ‘nice’ — they’re really boring”
• “you shouldn’t use the same adjective more than once in an essay”
• “you need to buy a thesaurus and stop using the same words”
• “don’t write in the first person”
• “your essay’s too short” (never “your essay’s too long”, mind you)
• “you need to describe the thing in more detail, and set the scene”
• “it’s too clichéd — there’s nothing original in your style”

I’ve had to unlearn all of this with time. Current-me would scold child-me for not challenging my teacher, but what’s an impressionable teenager to do?

Picking up bad habits

Microsoft Word’s thesaurus became my best friend, and I started to drop the words ‘obsequious’ into everything I did. Essays for music GCSE? Sure, it could go into one of those. Spanish oral exams? Sure, I’d find the nearest translation and use it somehow. My determination knew no bounds.

I’ve still no idea what the word means.

It got worse at degree level, with my first exposure to Latin phrases like ‘vis-à-vis’, ‘ibid’, ‘et sequa’, ‘inter alia’ and ‘de facto’. My humble state school education (and relative lack of home broadband during the early 2000s) meant that I never even knew Latin existed until 2004. I think I understood what these phrases meant at some point down the road, probably through process of elimination. It’s hard to really tell though, in hindsight.

The flipside

As an impressionable, wide-eyed child, education may well be your only chance to develop a wide vocabulary. Constraining vocabularies to the bare basics might hinder kids’ personal development, and stop them being able to express themselves (and understand others).

Also, I realise that not everyone ends up working on user-centred content as part of their day to day.

What I’m suggesting

With coding now part of the national curriculum and things like product and UX design courses popping up all over the shop, I find it surprising that no-one’s out there campaigning for plain English in schools.

Imagine a world where:

• children are taught the value of expressing themselves in the simplest, most direct way
• word limits don’t exist — and the most important thing was just to get across what you’re saying simply, clearly and quickly
• you learn by looking at your classmates’ work
• you work to a style guide
• you start to pick up on badly written information in the wide world from a young age

The benefits of plain English in education

I’ve found myself in countless work situations where a ‘stakeholder’ (never a content person) of some kind wants to A/B test ‘their’ content against something I’ve been working on. It’s usually a power trip, and every time it’s happened it’s just been based on a personal dislike of simplicity — my proposed solution, naturally.

Everyone thinks they can write, and maybe that’s because they were praised for writing floridly once upon a time. If you balanced that out with a parallel focus on plain English in schools, it’s easy to see a world where content people would be better valued by more people.