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the official with. An example of this is the following, by an evening-paper gossip-writer, about a Bill just introduced in Parliament:
It is written in that abominable civil service jargon, which is as stiff, heavy, lumbering and ungraceful as a wheelbarrow being pushed through sodden clay … It would be a Herculean task to teach the Civil Service to write its own language creditably.
    That the style of Bills, Statutory Orders and other such documents has peculiarities cannot be denied, but if it is jargon * —an arguable question—its species is the legal not the official. It is written by lawyers, not by civil servants (in the sense in which the critics use the term), and its peculiarities arise from causes exactly opposite to those of the peculiarities alleged against ordinary officials.
Those of the one come from a desire to convey a precise meaning; those of the other—so it is said—come too often from a reluctance to convey any meaning at all.
    I do not mean to imply that there is no room for improvement in the drafting of statutory documents; but such writing is prudently left to a specialised branch of the Civil Service, and therefore falls outside the scope of this book. It is more a science than an art; it lies in the province of mathematics rather than of literature, and its practice needs long apprenticeship. *
    The only concern of ordinary officials is to learn to understand legal English, to be able to act as interpreters of legal English to ordinary people, and to be careful not to let it taint their own style of writing, a subject to which we will return.

III
The Elements
    This then is Style … essentially it resembles good manners. It comes of endeavouring to understand others, of thinking for them rather than yourself—of thinking, that is, with the heart as well as the head … So, says Fénelon … ‘your words will be fewer and more effectual; and while you make less ado, what you do will be more profitable’.
    Q UILLER -C OUCH ,
On the Art of Writing
, 1916
    Having thus cleared the decks, we can return to the various other purposes for which official writing has to be used. In the past it consisted mostly of departmental minutes and instructions, interdepartmental correspondence, and despatches to governors and ambassadors. These things still have their places, but in volume they must have been left far behind by the vast output now necessary for explaining the law to the public. An immense quantity of modern social legislation and innumerable statutory controls have been necessitated by the war and its consequences. Yet members of the public are still supposed to know the law without being told, and ignorance is no excuse for breaking it. That was all very well in the days when ordinary citizens had little more concern with the law than an obligation to avoid committing the crimes prohibited by the Ten Commandments; no niceties needed explaining to them then. Today, however, our daily lives are conditioned by an infinity of statutory rights and obligations. Even
if the laws that define them were short, simple and intelligible, the number of these laws alone would prevent most people from discovering by their own study what they all were.
    The official must be the interpreter. Now this is a task as delicate as it is difficult. An official interpreting the law is looked on with suspicion. It is for the legislature to make the laws, for the executive to administer them, and for the judiciary to interpret them. The official must avoid all appearance of encroaching on the province of the Courts. For this reason it used to be a rule in the Civil Service that when laws were brought to the notice of those affected by them, the actual words of the statute must be used. In no other way could officials be sure of escaping all imputation of putting their own interpretation on the law. Here, then, we have a dilemma. If the official is tied to the words of the law, and if, as we have seen, the words of the