CIVIL SERVICE ENGLISH
SIR,—I have always admired Harold Nicolson's prose, if not always his views. This opinion is reinforced by reading his article on Civil Service English, which reveals an astonishing lack of perception of what goes on in Government departments. To say that Government officials have to dictate fifty letters in the course of a single morning's work, as well as some hundred minutes, in addition to spending long hours in conference, is an exaggeration of the first order. I have had many years of experience of work in a Government department as a senior official. I have yet to meet the civil servant who has to cope singly with such a volume of work. Neither have I met his like in business, in which sphere I have had even longer experience.
Very few civil servants dictate their letters as a matter of course. The very nature of their work compels them to weigh carefully every word of a written communication, and justly so when sleuths abound at every turn to pounce upon every utterance. This quite apart from the notorious lack of shorthand typists in most Government departments. The usual pro- cedure is for matter to be written out m longhand and passed to a long- suffering typists' pool, who struggle to interpret the often illegible hand- writing of both senior and junior officials.
But quite apart from the principles of organisation and method, I take exception to the continual criticism of official English coming from both inside and outside the civil service from those who, it is clear, have not had an opportunity of studying the subject fully. The general standard of day-to-day English in the civil service is of a very high order, and indeed surpasses anything coming out of a bt.siness organisation. One has only to work in a Government department and have an opportunity of examining the files to realise the Nicolsonian excellence of official prose. And, by comparison with much commercial jargon, the civil servant is a
purist.—Yours faithfully, A. A. GARNETT. 94 Ernest Grove, Eden Park, Beckenham.
Previous page
