Editing The Complete Plain Words (section)

==Background==
The association of wordiness with bureaucracy has a long history. In the 14th century [[Geoffrey Chaucer]], a prominent civil servant as well as a poet, urged the use of straightforward writing.{{#tag:ref|In ''[[The House of Fame]]'' (c. 1380) Chaucer wrote:
:Have I not preved thus simply,
:Withouten any subtiltee
:Of speche, or gret prolixitee
:Of termes of philosophye,
:Of figures of poetrye,
:Or colours of rethoryke?
:Pardee, hit oghte thee to lyke;
:For hard langage and hard matere
:Is encombrous for to here
:At ones<ref>Chaucer, Geoffrey. [http://www.gutenberg.org/files/45027/45027-h/45027-h.htm ''The House of Fame''], lines 854–864</ref>|group= n}} Reviewing ''Plain Words'' in 1948, ''[[The Manchester Guardian]]'' quoted the French revolutionary [[Martial Joseph Armand Herman|Martial Herman]] writing in 1794:
{{quote|The nonsensical jargon of the old Ministries must be replaced by a simple style, clear and yet concise, free from expressions of servility, from obsequious formulae, stand-offishness, pedantry, or any suggestion that there is an authority superior to that of reason, or of the order established by law. There must be no conventional phrases, no waste of words.<ref name=mgpw>"Plain Words", ''The Manchester Guardian'', 15 April 1948, p. 4</ref>|}}
The British civil service of the 19th and early 20th centuries had a reputation for pomposity and long-windedness in its written communications. In ''[[Little Dorrit]]'' in the mid-1850s, [[Charles Dickens]] caricatured officialdom as the "Circumlocution Office", where for even the most urgent matter nothing could be done without "half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical correspondence."<ref>Dickens, Chapter 10</ref> By the 1880s the term "officialese" was in use, defined by the [[Oxford English Dictionary]] as, "The formal and typically verbose language considered characteristic of officials or official documents".<ref>[http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/130657?redirectedFrom=officialese#eid "officialese"], Oxford English Dictionary, retrieved 5 April 2014 {{subscription required}}</ref>

[[File:Ernest-Gowers-1920.jpg|left|thumb|[[Ernest Gowers]] in 1920]]
[[Ernest Gowers|Sir Ernest Gowers]], a senior civil servant, was among those who wished to see officialese replaced by normal English. In 1929 he remarked in a speech about the civil service, "It is said{{nbsp}}... that we revel in jargon and obscurity".<ref>''quoted'' in Gowers (2014), p. xii</ref> During the Second World War, with the role of government greatly expanded, official communications proliferated, and in Gowers's{{#tag:ref|Gowers was not dogmatic about the possessive form of names such as his that end in "s", but he described the form "Jones's room" as "the most favoured practice" as opposed to "Jones' room".<ref>Gowers (1951), p. 9</ref> In her biography of Gowers, his granddaughter Ann Scott uses the form "Gowers' room"; in the extensive biographical sketch that prefaces the 2014 edition of ''Plain Words'', his great-granddaughter Rebecca Gowers uses "Gowers's room".<ref>Scott, ''passim'' and Gowers (2014), pp. vii–xxvii</ref> After the 1973 revised edition came out, Bruce Fraser was criticised for referring to "Gowers' work", rather than "Gowers's work". To an amateur grammarian who objected, he replied, "No one can deny that what you say is entirely logical and sensible",<ref>Parkin, Michael, "Harris harries the 'S'-droppers", ''The Guardian'', 3 August 1973, p. 6</ref> but he retained the shorter form in reprints of the edition, and it was preserved in the Greenbaum and Whitcut edition of 1986.<ref>Gowers (1973), p. iii; and Gowers (1986), p. iii</ref>|group= n}} view were full of "mistiness and grandiloquence". He called for a new style of official writing, friendly in tone and easy to understand.<ref name=gxii>Gowers (2014), p. xii</ref> His views came to the notice of the head of the civil service, [[Edward Bridges, 1st Baron Bridges|Sir Edward Bridges]], permanent secretary to the [[HM Treasury|Treasury]]. After Gowers retired from the civil service at the end of the war,{{#tag:ref|Gowers's public service career continued as chairman of several [[Royal Commission]]s and other bodies until 1953, and on the board of the National Hospitals for Nervous Diseases until 1957.<ref name=who>[http://www.ukwhoswho.com/view/article/oupww/whowaswho/U55846 "Gowers, Sir Ernest Arthur"], ''Who Was Who'', A & C Black, 1920–2008; online edition, Oxford University Press, December 2007, retrieved 5 April 2014 {{subscription required}}</ref>|group= n}} Bridges asked him to write a short pamphlet on good writing, for the benefit of the new generation of officials.<ref name=gxii/> Bridges called on his senior colleagues throughout the civil service to cooperate; some had already made efforts in the same cause, including the [[Inland Revenue]], whose advice to staff included "one golden rule to bear in mind always: that we should try to put ourselves in the position of our correspondent, to imagine his feelings as he writes his letters, and to gauge his reaction as he receives ours."<ref name=timespw>"Plain Words", ''The Times'', 15 April 1948, p. 5</ref>{{#tag:ref|This use of "he" to indicate readers of both sexes was customary at the time, and was used in the original ''Plain Words'' and its successors until the 1986 revision.<ref>Gowers (2014), p. xviii</ref> Twenty-five years after the first ''Plain Words'', David Hunt, reviewing the 1973 edition, wrote, "No writer of English at any level, from the most elaborate to the most utilitarian, can fail to derive profit from this book. He could [profit] for example, by studying Sir Bruce's instructions on how to arrange his thoughts before starting to write."<ref name=hunt/>|group= n}}

Government departments sent Gowers many examples of officialese so extreme as to be amusing; a small committee of senior officials formed to help him and comment on his proposals. The colleague on whom Gowers most relied was [[Llewelyn Wyn Griffith]] of the Inland Revenue, whose contribution Gowers acknowledged in the prefaces to ''Plain Words'' and its two successors.<ref>Gowers (1954), p. iv</ref>