bout de papier, Vol. 4, No. 3 (1986) — Fall 1986 // Automne 1986, pp. 31–32
The Canadian Style:
A Guide to Writing
and Editing. Publish-
ed by the Depart-
ment of the Secre-
tary of State,
Methuen, 1986,
$11.95.
The Canadian
Style: A Guide to
Style: A Guide to Writing and Editing, published last year by the Department of the Secretary of State, is the English-language counterpart of French-language style manual published by that department in 1983 (the Guide du rédacteur de l’administration fédérale) and it is said to replace the Government of Canada Style Manual for Writers and Editors, last reprinted in 1966. I confess that this is the first time I have ever seen any of these volumes, which is a sad commentary on something or other, because I have had a fair amount to do with writing and editing in the department, both while in active service and since retirement. All that I had to go on were occasional ephemeral bits and pieces of paper, containing a few do’s and dont’s, emanating from individuals in SCI and SCS and their predecessor units in External.
In earlier years, departmental effort seemed to be devoted as much to destroying writing style as to improving it. This resulted from External’s continuing preoccupation with minimizing expense and labour in our growing telegram traffic. For decades, our facilities for encyphering, decyphering and transmitting over our own and British lines were puny compared to the sophisticated and far-flung electronic apparatus of today. A year never went by without some edict from types like Herb Moran or John Starnes enjoining us to cut, abbreviate or dispense entirely with our precious draft telegrams. Letters and dispatches sent by diplomatic bag, rather than telegrams, were encouraged. If telegrams really had to be sent, the priorities we assigned (for speed and handling in transmission) were intermittently monitored. Occasionally a prize would be offered for traffic-cutting suggestions. I did not win one when, to illustrate how journalists were allowed by cable companies and editors to compress phrases and combine words, I offered as an example the message sent by a foreign correspondent, intending to resign, to his managing editor at Head Office: UPSHOVE JOB ASSWARDS (incurring cable tolls for three words instead of at least six).
But the telegram-parers found it difficult to cope, as they doubtless still do today, with certain Externally human failings — the higher the rank, the more marked – the propensity of officers to assume that reports sent by telegram, rather than by mail or bag, with an imposing list of addressees and with a high security classification, preferably “Top Secret-Canadian Eyes Only”, would more likely catch the eye of their betters at Headquarters than a letter with the lowly “Restricted” and sent by bag.
Before some unkind reader wonders when I am going to deal with the rather pompously-entitled The Canadian Style: A Guide to Writing and Editing, I want to indulge in another recollection which admittedly is somewhat oblique to this subject. It has to do with copies.
In the early fifties I was appointed spokesman and head of the Press Office and soon found that the prevailing mentality was that the best way to guard External’s secrets
– which included about everything the Department did at that time — was to keep the spokesman in ignorance, at least until some public announcement unhappily could no longer be avoided. So I sought to convince the USSEA that the best way to guard the department’s secrets was to make the spokesman privy to them. If I were kept in ignorance, the press would simply seek out other officers perhaps less qualified in dealing with the press; whereas, if I were kept informed, I could anticipate questions that would arise, answers that might be given, responses that might be expected and problems that could not be avoided. This wise and quite novel idea was quickly approved by Arnold Heeney and I began to receive the daily “pack” of telegrams. I then suggested that I be provided with copies of memos to the Minister, which would provide exposure to the whole spectrum of External’s activities, normally available only to the under-secretarial group. Again Mr. Heeney agreed, but I ran into an unexpected problem: how stenos could squeeze out an extra carbon copy for me, in addition to the half dozen or more required for the Minister’s and USSEA’s offices. The pecking order in the department could be precisely discerned from the legibility of the carbon copy you received of a memo to the Minister. My ambitious program of self-education nearly foundered over the stenographers’ difficulty of producing a legible seventh carbon copy under that thick vellum and I soon required reading glasses for the first time. This will explain my conviction that the most important technological breakthrough since World War Il has not been the computer but the photocopy machine.
Today’s PAFSO members would not find credible what we had to do to manage without it, and without facsimile and word processors. But those earlier East Block days could provide a wondrous bounty to anyone who took the trouble to profit from it – exposure to distinguished colleagues who could write the Queen’s English with elegance and style: Hume Wrong, John Holmes, Escott Reid, Charles Ritchie, Gerry Riddell, Herbert Norman – and the unforgettable and quite extraordinary Archibald A. Day. It was not so much that these exalted officers sought to teach you but, if you had any interest at all in matters of language, you could not help but learn from them, if only by a process of osmosis. And they would take the trouble to be helpful, because in earlier days the quality of our writing was considered professionally important. Some of the learning came through enjoinders to observe their pet taboos. Around 1950, John Holmes descended on us at PERMISNY and promptly asserted the dictum that Externalites do not feel; they think or believe, or hold a view or have an opinion. Under John, Permdel did not report that he felt that the U.S.A. would support our draft. He reported that he believed the U.K. proposal would gain a majority, and he thought that the French would soon rally round. This may sound pretty trite, but there was much more and, after all, John went on to become the foremost writer – and of international import, on Canada’s external relations. Except to the denser among us, John’s impeccable crafting of bouts de papier, at PERMIS and in the East Block, was infectious.
Escott Reid, you would quickly learn, disliked sentences starting with “however” was unhappy with mixed metaphors such as “massive reaction”, and was intolerant of the use of conventional but unwarranted verbs in place of the simple “to be, ,” e.g. “this figure represented an increase of Canadian exports over last year,” or “wheat emerged as the leading component in our balance of payments.”
And Charles Ritchie? Hmm… I saw little of his paper; perhaps even then he had an eye on its possible post-graduate use. But what he did to our’s, or at least mine! He could drive one up the wall with obscure comments, seemingly hieroglyphic, on the precious pieces of paper that went up for his approval. Down the left-hand margin of a paragraph he might simply draw a vague, wavy line, leaving you to wonder what – if anything — was the matter with it. At the end of a key paragraph, he might inscribe an enigmatic “Really?” or an equally unhelpful “Mmm.” To precipitate under-secretarial decision making, you would conclude your memo by offering a couple of options. Charles, bless his soul, might simply append to the two of them “Yes” or “Agreed”
External’s most ardent, most untiring, early champion of good English was indisputably that erudite stylist, Archibald A. Day. Archie had been a classics scholar at Queen’s, with a wide knowledge of literature and the humanities. From 1949 to 1951 he had been Secretary of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (the famed Massey Commission) and wrote much of its path-breaking Report. When I began to work under Archie, he had been appointed head of the department’s omnibus Information Division, which had been enlarged to absorb some journalistic types selected by External from the ranks of the terminating Wartime Information Board.
By the time I joined him in 1951, Archie had become appalled at the bureaucratese, if not plain functional illiteracy, that he had found around External, notwithstanding the felicitous English written by some illustrious colleagues. He soon issued three memoranda on “The Queen’s English”, which were not simply obiter dicta on linguistic malpractices around the East Block (and the Daly Building and the Coleman Building and the Post Office Building and the other structural excrescences amongst which we were scattered) but Delphic Oracles on style, composition and usage. Archie’s memoranda, issued circa 1951, might fetch a tidy sum if auctioned today at Walker’s, if not at Christie’s or Sotheby’s. I have his revised version, issued in 1956, when he was heading Consular Division and became even more appalled, if that were possible, at the blemishes in the belles-lettres with which he was presented for signature there.
In his memoranda Archie inveighed against the misusage – no less prevalent today — of “advise” when “inform” is intended: the USSEA informed the Minister that he would be taking his vacation in July; he advised the Minister not to appoint an Acting USSEA during his absence. “Advise” means to give advice, Archie insisted, and does not mean to give information. 1, too, have been no less purist all these years out have just now looked at the Concise Oxford and Roget’s Thesaurus and may henceforth not be quite so adamant!
Archie would not tolerate “ongoing” (continuing), “upcoming” (impending, soon), “overall” (an article of clothing). Nor would he tolerate, especially at the beginning of a sentence, such phrases as “in regard to”, “in connection with” “in this connection”, which he denigrated as the writer’s equivalent of a speaker clearing his throat and as stock filler phrases, “most of them meaningless and time-consuming” ’, which have “crept treacherously” into External’s correspondence.
A favourite Day bugaboo (which I still rigorously observe) is not to misplace the adverb “only”. It cannot be rammed into a sentence anywhere and should be used to limit only the word or phrase it immediately precedes. Archie rebuked Consular Division for writing “Passports are only issued to authorized holders”; the implication, he presents. Obviously, the sentence should be “Passports are issued only to authorized persons”. Correct placement of “only” can avoid ambiguity or downright error. For example “I only want a glass of beer”. Does this mean I don’t crave a glass but just want it? Does it mean I don’t want Scotch, just beer? Does it mean that I don’t want a whole jug but just a glass of beer?
Although immersed in Consular Division, Archie surprisingly had nothing to say about the commonly misused words emigrate and immigrate — you emigrate from a country and immigrate into a country, and you don’t write that Albert Einstein, who had been living in London, immigrated to the United States.
The very first sentence in the volume under review states “The Department of the Secretary of States’s Translation Bureau is pleased to present The Canadian Style: A Guide to Writing and Editing ….. “ Now read what Archie Day had to say in “The Queen’s English” in 1956:
PLEASED — The expression “we are pleased to advise you that” and “I shall be pleased to refer this matter …” occur repeatedly in our correspondence. As for the first phrase, if it is going to be used, why not complete it so it will read “we are graciously pleased to advise you that”? “We are pleased” is suitable for the style of a reigning monarch, and the use of the plural “We” adds to the pomposity of this bit of jargon. “We” may very properly be used, of course, when it is thought necessary to imply that the decision has been reached through departmental consultation; most of our letters are signed by or for the Under- Secretary or the Minister, so that the singular pronoun “I” is normally appropriate. It is strongly recommended that the whole business of “pleased to advise”,, whether plural or singular, be abandoned, I, and that it be replaced by some such simple phrase as: “I am now able to inform you that …
Archie could not tolerate a phrase like “I shall not fail to let you know …” He said: “This equally pompous expression occurs with painful frequency in • our correspondence. This is a heavy and melodramatic way of saying: I shall let you know promptly. The implication of this high voltage phrase is that, ’Come earthquake or revolution, come tempest, flood or pestilence, I shall somehow manage to struggle to my office in the Daly Building and let you know that there has been no change as yet in the Immigration Regulations.”
New State volume will help you to abbreviate and hyphenate.
I could go on and on. You will realize, of course, that Archie’s memoranda, and the pretentiously-entitled The Canadian Style: A Guide to Writing and Editing, however valuable they may be in reducing your malapropisms and other gaucheries, will not really help you acquire elegance of style and felicity of expression – in the manner of a John Holmes (or a Harold Nicholson).
The new State volume will help you correctly and uniformly to abbreviate, hyphenate, capitalize, spell, punctuate, italicize, quote, proofread and index (there are chapters on all these) and there is an especially useful appendix (p. 233-236) “Elimination of sexual, racist and ethnic stereotyping in written communications” (although this is surely superfluous for members of PAFSO!). It is useful to be reminded when to use continual rather than continuous, to avoid defective when you mean deficient, to distinguish compare from contrast and characteristic from typical. Our exalted EX’s will all know the difference between appraise and apprise, liable and likely, allusion and illusion, assume and presume, compare and contrast, farther and further, etcetera, etcetera.
As a sequal to this pot-pourri I propose to the editor of bout de papier that he publish one of Archie’s memoranda in a forthcoming issue, including his Index Verborum Prohibitorum – unexpurgated, of course. A
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 4, No. 3 (1986) — Fall 1986 // Automne 1986, pp. 31–32. Read the rest of this issue →
