Plain Words by Rebecca Gowers

employer only, in respect of such employment, do not give him title to any health benefits or pension, and moreover a man is not at liberty to pay any contributions on his own account as a voluntary contributor for any period after his 65th birthday.
    This sentence contains three statements of fact linked by the conjunction
and
. Because this is its form, no reader can be quite sure until reading beyond the
and
s whether any of these statements has been completed. Only in re-reading the sentence will many people pick up the statements one by one. If they had been separated by full stops (after
later
and
pension
) and the
and
s omitted, each statement could have been grasped at first reading. The full stops would have seemed to say: ‘Have you got that? Very well, now I’ll tell you something else’.
    (8) Be compact. Do not put a strain on your reader’s memory by widely separating parts of a sentence that are closely related to one another. Why, for instance, is this sentence difficult to grasp on first reading?
A deduction of tax may be claimed in respect of any person whom the individual maintains at his own expense, and who is (i) a relative of his, or of his wife, and incapacitated by old age or infirmity from maintaining himself or herself, or (ii) his or his wife’s widowed mother, whether incapacitated or not, or (iii) his daughter who is resident with him and upon whose services he is compelled to depend by reason of old age or infirmity.
    The structure of the sentence is too diffuse. The reader has to keep in mind the opening words all the way through. The last point explained is that a deduction of tax may be claimed ‘in respect of any person whom the individual maintains at his own expense and who is his daughter’, but
his daughter
is separated from
who is
by no fewer than thirty-two words. In a later leaflet of income tax instructions, the same sentence was rewritten to run as follows:
If you maintain a relative of yourself or your wife who is unable to work because of old age or infirmity, you can claim an allowance of … You can claim this allowance if you maintain your widowed mother, or your wife’s widowed mother, whether she is unable to work or not. If you maintain a daughter who lives with you because you or your wife are old or infirm, you can claim an allowance of …
    Why is the new version so much easier to grasp than the old? Partly it is because a sentence of eighty-one words has been split into three, each making a statement complete in itself. But it is also because a device has been employed that is a most useful one when an official has to say, as an official so often must, that such-and-such a class of people who have such-and-such attributes, and perhaps such-and-such other attributes, have such-and-such rights or obligations. The device is to say:
if
you belong to such-and-such a class of people, and
if
you have such-and-such attributes, you have such-and-such a right or obligation (that is, the device is to use conditional clauses in the second person instead of relative clauses in the third). The advantage of this is that it avoids the wide separation of the main verb from the main subject. The subject
you
comes immediately next to the verb it governs, and in this way you announce unmistakably to your reader: ‘I have finished describing the class of people
about whom I have to tell you something, and I shall now say what that something is’.
    (9) Do not say more than is necessary. The feeling that prompts you to tell your correspondent everything when you give an explanation is commendable, but you will often be of more help if you resist it, and confine yourself to the facts that make clear what has happened.
I regret however that the Survey Officer who is responsible for the preliminary investigation as to the technical possibility of installing a telephone at the address quoted by any applicant has reported that owing to a shortage of a spare pair of wires to the underground