Using Ethical Language
Enter your revision in the box below each exercise. Click the “+” below each box to see Dr. Hirst’s revision.
Exercise #1:
Revise each sentence to achieve gender fairness and to avoid offending folks of all kinds.
We sent our patient to see Dr. Smith and Dr. Jenny Brown.
Our workmen have logged scores of man hours on this project.
A team of firemen and state militiamen controlled the blaze and the crowd.
An engineer knows his designs will be put to the test in this earthquake zone.
Everyone at the conference wanted his name on his company’s promotional items.
Each client must sign his or her waiver in the presence of his or her legal representative.
ACME has developed a new product for hair-disadvantaged men.
Our five-year mission is to boldly go where no man has gone before.
Ever since our client cut his man power, he can’t handle the surge in demand for his company’s product. [Let's assume that the client referred to is male.]
The policeman stated that the suspect escaped by diving into an open personhole in the street.
This Internet product will benefit all mankind.
Our new line of clothing accommodates the differently sized.
No one wants to admit that he or she is afraid of a man-sized job like this.
A speech, like a woman’s skirt, should be short enough to hold interest, yet long enough to cover the subject.
A lawyer wants his client to be calm, a doctor wants his patient to be obedient, a CEO wants his stockholders to be worshipful.
Tell the Truth
This tutorial is not the place to lecture you about the importance of truth telling. In the words of the Nike ad: “Just Do It.” If you yourself are honest as the day is long but your employer tends to waffle, tell your employer (in the words of Ben Franklin): “Honesty is the best policy.” Because it really is. If your employer doesn’t agree, find a new employer.
In my experience, the problem in professional communication isn’t so much that lies are told as that truth is sometimes disguised. For example: while working as a visiting editor at a government laboratory, I once edited the phrase “considerable non-containment of radionuclide-containing materials” to the phrase “serious radiation leaks”–to the consternation of some people at the lab. (This was in a report about the status of thousands of oxidizing metal barrels of radioactive waste out on an unprotected blacktop.) Both phrases said the same thing, but one revealed it much more clearly than the other. Which phrase strikes you as more truthful–or at least as more ethical, given the goals of good professional communication?
Again: by virtue of working through these style units, you have already been practicing a style that “tells the truth” more clearly than usual. When you use active voice you reveal agents, consequences, and responsibility more clearly; when you denominalize you create clear, active verbs that help the reader see what’s going on; when you reduce unnecessary jargon and cut fat, you get right to the point and help the reader understand, just as quickly and clearly as possible, what’s what.
But, you protest, “Don’t I have a right to shape my words so as to advance my own best interests–to put my best foot forward? Doesn’t my lab or department or business or company have that right as well?” Sure y’all do. You’re always free to do what linguist S.I. Hiakawa calls “semantic engineering.” A big part of the art of rhetoric is devoted to putting one’s best foot forward. And you should put your best legitimate foot forward. You do it every time you revise your resume, don’t you? But you know very well that there’s a line somewhere between your best foot and a false step.
Writers take that false step in many ways. This part of the tutorial will focus on just one of the most common: use of inflated language that tries to hide or soften “objectionable facts” (things the writer assumes the reader would react to negatively).
Here’s an example. Let’s say that you and a bunch of your friends take my editing class here at UT and that I make my course too hard and fail the lot of you. In fact, let’s say that many of my English department colleagues have started doing the same thing, and that the local press gets wind of it and we have to make a statement to them about it. We write a letter that never admits we “failed” a great number of students but instead explains that we have “expedited the progress of many students towards alternate life pursuits.” Great, huh? How are you feeling about our truthfulness just now?
The hypothetical letter I’ve just described (English teachers would never really do such a thing) uses what William Lutz calls “doublespeak.” He takes the word from George Orwell’s 1984 and defines it as “the language of insincerity, where there is a gap between the speaker’s real and declared aims. It is language as an instrument for concealing and preventing thought, not for expressing or extending thought. Such language silences dialogue and blocks communication.” –Lutz, Quarterly Review of Doublespeak 17:4, July 1991.
Doublespeak doesn’t tell the truth. Don’t use it. When you see it in your company’s or colleagues’ writing, edit it out. Your ethos–that is, the perception your audience receives of your good sense, good will, and good character–will benefit.
Exercise #2:
Get rid of doublespeak in the following sentences:
Our company is undergoing extensive proactive rightsizing.
Acme Electronics is currently operating in a negative
demand area.
The U.S. brought together resources in order to prevent a massive outflow of Haitian immigrants.
The man taught English for the Learning Impaired to citizens who had spent time in correctional facilities.
The candidate became factually flexible in the heat of the campaign.
America’s inner cities are experiencing involuntary downward deployment of the work force.
The captured fauna were entered into a wildlife conservation program that enjoys permanent facilities.
The job requires multiple container packaging of marketing materials, then coordination of shipments to customers and vendors.
Civilian irregular defense soldiers caused ambient noncombatant personnel to vacate the area.
Your computer cost more because we equipped it with a high-velocity, multi-purpose atmospheric circulator.
Attempts are being made to control fugitive emissions of carbonic chemical reactions and prevent unintentional product bypassing of the on-site biological treatment plant.
During the armed situation, U.S. weapons systems visited multiple Iraqi sites, sanitizing both hard and soft targets.