I generally advise people not to get too hung up if they have to work with legal texts. In my opinion, good English is good English, whether it’s used in legal writing or in a sports report. Nonetheless, there’s one aspect of working with legal texts that lawyers, editors and translators need to take on board, and that’s the need to be faithful in preserving the original or intended meaning of any text you’re modifying. This was brought home to me recently by one of my favourite language resources.
I frequently find myself referring to style guides from quality newspapers because they usually strike the balance I also want to achieve between accessibility and writing for an educated readership. Probably resource I most often call on is Guardian Style (@guardianstyle on Twitter and with its online site at http://www.theguardian.com/styleguide/).
Recently, the editor of Guardian Style, David Marsh, produced an informative and entertaining book called For Who The Bell Tolls, which can be acquired in hard cover or for Kindle here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Who-Bell-Tolls-David-Marsh-ebook/dp/B00ER809QG/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1384762700&sr=1-1&keywords=david+marsh+for+who+the+bell+tolls/. However, there was one particular comment in the book that illustrates to me the slightly different way we need to think in the legal world.
At one point in his discourse, Marsh quotes the CEO of Barclays Bank in the UK as saying: ‘Barclays leadership population will be tasked and supported to be visible exemplars and champions of these values and behaviours.’ Of course, this is risible corporate bullshit of the type that will be despised by anyone with a soul (along with ‘leverage’ as a verb, ‘proactive’ and so on); no amount of mockery of it can be too great. Marsh illustrates that what the speaker meant can be encapsulated in just six words, the suggested paraphrase being: ‘Barclays bosses will lead by example.’
I think that’s probably a fair summary of what the CEO wanted to say about his bank, but if that were a legal text you can’t simply sweep away the detritus so readily. Imagine the speaker were making a statement about obligations that were intended to have legal force. The nature of the paraphrase makes a subtle but potentially significant change.
In legal terms, the key words here are ‘tasked’ and ‘supported’ so those are the ideas that have to be conveyed when we put this into the kind of language normal people would use. In legal drafting, I’d argue that it’s better to use the active than the passive (with regard to obligations, we should state who must do what to whom). Presumably it’s Barclays that will do this.
My suggestion, then, would be along the lines of: ‘Barclays asks its senior staff to lead by example, and we’ll help them to do that.’
