”We lawyers do not write plain English. We use eight words to say what could be said in two. We use arcane phrases to express commonplace ideas. Seeking to be precise, we become redundant. Seeking to be cautious, we become verbose. Our sentences twist on, phrase within clause within clause, glazing the eyes and numbing the minds of our readers. The result is a writing style that has, according to one critic, four outstanding characteristics. It is “(1) wordy, (2) unclear, (3) pompous, and (4) dull.”
(Mellinkoff, The Language of the Law, 1963)
To those with a good knowledge of Italian the following websites may give you a hint about why the majority of Italian public notices and warnings are written in an incomprehensible at times even ridiculous language. This website clearly expain you why.
Plain Words, a guide to the use of English this revolutionary booklet written in 1948 by Sir Ernest Gowers is past history for Britons, but it should be read dayly by Italian Admin Personnel if they love the beauty of the Italian language and get rid for good of those ‘brutture’ (horrible language) often seen on Bank notices, utility bills, rules and regulations printed on the back of your bus ticket christened by some enlighned bureacrat ‘il documento di viaggio’ (a document for travelling), let alone the Byzantine and flamboyant language of Italian Air Force Colonels giving the weather report on Italian state TV where ‘ heavy rain’ becomes ‘rovesci di carattere temporalesco.
For those suffering from a communicative disease looking for a cure on how to turn a gobbledygook legal texts into a simple, efficient and elegant piece of writing visit they will find a source of inspiration using plainenglish. This is a pugnacious English pressure group fighting against those who would like to reintroduce the equivalent of the Italian Bureaucratese back into U.K. administrative literature.