Plain English: a financial writer's point of view

Richard Beddard is a financial journalist and editor of the website, 'Interactive Investor'. He also reads his local council magazine. Here he tells the IDeA why it's important for language to be precise and why writers should keep on asking questions.

The October edition of our council magazine arrived the other day, just in time to inspire this article on plain English.

The magazine’s an important part of our council’s effort to inform residents and promote its work. Although I don’t usually open it with alacrity, that says more about my priorities than its quality. But this time instead of flicking through the headlines or checking for buried stories on new toxic waste disposal plants, I determined to read an article to the end.

‘Meet the Economic Development Officer’ looked promising. I started in journalism as part-time editor of a development journal in Tanzania and I’m a financial writer, so I was curious. What would an economic development officer do in such a developed place? I live in a village near Cambridge, where industry is often at the molecular level, and tractors are the size of bungalows.

The answer: she will be “developing an economic baseline”, and “developing relations with key contacts as this will be important to deliver projects that will benefit the community”.

I’m relieved she’s not going to bother with unnecessary contacts of little importance, or waste time on irrelevant projects that won’t benefit anyone. But I do want to know who she’s going to work with, on what, and why. Sadly, the article doesn’t say.

I’m not criticising the whole magazine. It’s mostly readable. And financial writers aren’t any better at plain English than people in local government.  Sometimes reading annual reports I feel like screaming into their baffling pages: “just tell me what the bloody company does”.

Who to blame

If my time with the magazine confirms anything, it’s that when finance and local government collide, English is doubly deformed. And when journalists repeat financial claptrap, it’s doubly dispiriting.

I blame writers and editors – and I don’t just mean people who call themselves 'writers' and 'editors'. Whatever your job title, if you write for one other person, you’re a writer. If you ask a writer to write, or if you change another writer’s words, you’re an editor.

Editors can do a lot of damage. If you’re in any doubt about how difficult their job is, read Giles Coren’s letter to The Times’ sub-editors. Sub-editors process an article so it fits on the page and meets the newspaper’s house style. They add headlines and intros, and they correct errors. They can also inadvertently change the meaning of a whole article just by changing one word.

Giles Coren's argument with his sub-editor – on the Guardian website

To damage an article though, it must be written well in the first place. Football fans should appreciate this analogy. Financial journalism has its Theo Walcotts – writers who cut through the rough tackles and brutish complexity of their subject.

I’d put Robert Peston, the BBC’s business editor in my plain English squad. His blog makes sense of the credit crisis, a rapidly evolving, jargon-ridden story about a financial system of monumental complexity.

Careless words

Nowhere is mis-communication more dangerous than in today’s febrile financial pages, which can panic an investor to sell shares at a huge loss, or transfer life savings into a foreign bank. As a government fighting a financial battle might say: “careless words cost livelihoods”.

That may not always be true. Sometimes carelessly chosen words just waste people’s time, or cause them to worry unnecessarily, or bore the reader enough to lose interest in the subject, publication, or the local council it’s promoting. Ill-chosen words are always counter-productive.

I’d give the captaincy of my plain English team to Isaac Asimov, a writer who was more famous for his science fiction than his equally well-written works of science and history. Facing criticism that his stories lacked literary style, he made a comparison with glass.

Stained glass dates back to the third century BC, but our ancestors did not work out how to manufacture ordinary plate glass – the clear, unblemished sort you barely notice in a window – until the 17th century, 2000 years later. It’s much harder to manufacture transparent plate glass than artistic stained glass.

An article need be no less artful, or difficult to write, because the reader can read it effortlessly. Asimov said:

“Sometimes you want to see what’s happening in the street, and even the smallest imperfection in the glass in the window will annoy you.”

Asimov was also a teacher and probably appreciated that the brightest students and youngest children –the best learners of all – don’t accept the world as we present it to them. They go on asking ‘who’, ‘where’, ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘why’, and ‘how’ – the basic questions that writers ask – until they get an answer that means something.

In finance, and local government, where clarity is so important, there are many reasons writers might not write in plain English. Deadlines, indolence and muddled thinking come to mind, but if we’re in a rush or lazy, that’s disrespectful to our readers, and our subjects.

A dull writer accepts the first answer he gets, even if the question is: “What are you going to do?” And the answer is: “Develop an economic baseline”.

A good writer would ask: “What’s an economic baseline?” Because a good writer keeps asking questions until he understands, so that his readers can understand too.

Article published October 2008.