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The Complete Plain Words, titled simply Plain Words in its 2014 revision, is a style guide written by Sir Ernest Gowers, published in 1954. It has never been out of print. It comprises expanded and revised versions of two pamphlets that he wrote at the request of HM Treasury, Plain Words (1948) and ABC of Plain Words (1951). The aim of the book is to help officials in their use of English as a tool of their trade. To keep the work relevant for readers in subsequent decades it has been revised by Sir Bruce Fraser in 1973, by Sidney Greenbaum and Janet Whitcut in 1986, and by the original author's great-granddaughter Rebecca Gowers in 2014. All the editions until that of 2014 were published by Her Majesty's Stationery Office (HMSO). The most recent is issued by an imprint of Penguin Books. 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. Reviewing Plain Words in 1948, The Manchester Guardian quoted the French revolutionary Martial Herman writing in 1794: 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. 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." 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". 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 ... that we revel in jargon and obscurity". During the Second World War, with the role of government greatly expanded, official communications proliferated, and in Gowers's view were full of "mistiness and grandiloquence". He called for a new style of official writing, friendly in tone and easy to understand. His views came to the notice of the head of the civil service, Sir Edward Bridges, permanent secretary to the Treasury. After Gowers retired from the civil service at the end of the war, Bridges asked him to write a short pamphlet on good writing, for the benefit of the new generation of officials. 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." 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. Plain Words, 1948 The result of Gowers's work was Plain Words, a 94-page booklet. It was judged successful by the civil service, and the Treasury considered that it should be made publicly available. Had Gowers written it as part of his duties while still a civil servant it would have automatically been Crown Copyright, but as he had not begun it until after his retirement he owned the rights. The Treasury offered a flat fee of £500, but he successfully held out for a royalty on every copy sold. The government publisher, His Majesty's Stationery Office (HMSO), issued the booklet for sale in April 1948. It was priced at two shillings (10 pence in British decimal currency); between April and Christmas 1948 it sold more than 150,000 copies and had to be reprinted seven times. Reviewers responded favourably. The Times Literary Supplement praised the book and engaged in a little mock-officialese of its own: "It deserves to be a 'best seller' (or perhaps we should say that in all the circumstances it may reasonably be anticipated that it will be found to evoke a relatively considerable demand on the part of the general public)." The Times devoted a leader to the work, and concluded, "for all its cool urbanity Plain Words is written with missionary zeal". The Manchester Guardian considered that by commissioning Plain Words from Gowers "the Treasury has put us all in its debt." The Economist commented, "The Stationery Office must have enjoyed publishing this book. It is great fun to read". Occasionally Gowers's humour misled literal-minded reviewers. The Daily Mail, Harold Nicolson and the grammarian G H Vallins objected to the conspicuously un-plain words of Gowers's opening sentences: The purpose of this book is to help officials in their use of written English. To some of them this may seem a work of supererogation, calculated only to place an unnecessary burden on a body of people already overburdened. When revising the text in preparation for The Complete Plain Words, Gowers abandoned the joke, and rewrote the second sentence as, "I suspect that this project may be received by many of them without any marked enthusiasm or gratitude." A substantive objection by Vallins to "the cult of 'plain English'" was his view that verbose phrases lose important nuances when reduced to plain words. He gave as an example "evacuated to alternative accommodation", which in his opinion has overtones that Gowers's "taken to other houses" lacks. ABC of Plain Words, 1951 The Treasury invited Gowers to build on the success of Plain Words by producing a second volume of advice on good, clear writing. As with its predecessor, he "had many helpers to thank", including Griffith and other civil service colleagues. He also drew on the works of well-known writers on English usage, including H W Fowler, A P Herbert and Eric Partridge. The ABC of Plain Words had 160 pages, and was priced at three shillings (15p). Gowers explained the purpose of the new book in his preface, "We must have something that can be kept on the desk and consulted on points of difficulty as they arise. Plain Words is of little use for that: it has not even an index". The new work consisted of articles, mostly brief, on points of vocabulary, grammar, construction, punctuati.... Discover the Rebecca Gowers popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Rebecca Gowers books.