:: GussetBLOG ::

:: Thursday, March 19, 2009 ::

Jargon

Council leaders have compiled a banned list of the 200 worst uses of jargon. The Local Government Association says such words and phrases must be avoided for staff to "communicate effectively."

Here is the full list of 200 words which, the Local Government Association says should not be used by councils.

Can you imagine trying to write an Environmental Impact Assessment (part of my job) without referring to the Baseline conditions, Best Practice approach to construction, using Guidelines, making your assessment Robust, performing a Scoping exercise or considering Sustainability?

I can see that these GUIDELINES are suggesting that these words should be avoided unless necessary (it was the BBC who called it a ban) but many of them already are the best way of explaining something in plain English.

There's no excuse for Blue sky thinking though.

Labels: Environment, Gov, Language

:: Dan 19.3.09 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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Do government departments waste piles of our tax on slick marketing, carefully worded sound bytes and committee led graphic design? No, not all of them. There's the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC). Who produce documents like Habitat management for bats: A guide for land managers, land owners and their advisors [1.4MB PDF] the fill it with cartoon drawings that seem to confuse bats with some kind of flightless bouncing ground-borne mammal, like an excitable winged mole, and even provides a table to demonstrate how common or rare a given species is that includes a key with various stages of happy flappy bats.





Exactly what demographic was this aimed at?

Labels: Ecology, Environment, Gov

:: Dan 15.9.08 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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