This was just a great story in the Wall Street Journal today, and I couldn’t agree more. Everyone in the personal financial planning community could benefit by using less jargon, and speaking more plain english!
NEW MILLS, England — A few months ago, 71-year-old Chrissie Maher got a mailing from her bank titled “Personal and Private Banking — Keeping You Informed.” Baffled by its blizzard of terms such as “account facility limit,” Ms. Maher replied in simpler language.
“The leaflet needs much more thought if it is to be understood by your customers,” she said in a letter to Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC. “As it stands, it should be renamed ‘Keeping You Confused.’ ”
After critiquing the pamphlet’s “tortuous and ambiguous sentences,” she redrafted it, changing terms like “maximum debit balance” to “the most that can be owed.”
RBS may have picked the wrong woman to target with financial mumbo jumbo. Ms. Maher is the founder of the Plain English Campaign, a 30-year-old group whose stated goal is to stem “the ever-growing tide of confusing and pompous language” that “takes away our democratic rights.”
Over the years, Ms. Maher and her group have battled police agencies, expansion planners at Heathrow Airport, and the “frequently bizarre language” of the European Union. (At issue: phrases such as “unlock clusters,” “subsidiarity” and “sector-specific benchmarking.”) She has blasted local government on the use of “worklessness” to refer to unemployment and once attacked the president of the U.K. Spelling Society over his claim that the apostrophe is “a waste of time.”
Now a grandmother of 11 who works out of a small farm in the hills outside Manchester, Ms. Maher is focusing on the current scourge of financial jargon.
In Plain English
Examples of Plain English’s suggested changes to government and business financial jargon:
From U.K. tax regulations:
Before: “The revocation by these Regulations of a provision previously revoked subject to savings does not affect the continued operations.”
After: “If a provision (requirement) which would have produced savings has been revoked (cancelled), it does not prevent the savings being made in another way.”
From the small print on a bank account agreement:
Before: “Interest earned on balances of less than £50,000 will be paid subject to tax status. Interest on balances of £50,000 or more will be paid without the deduction of tax.”
After: “We will pay interest on balances of less than £50,000 depending on your tax circumstances. We will pay the interest on balances of £50,000 or more without taking tax off.”
From a bank customer mailing:
Before: Without prejudice to condition 2.1 (b), the maximum debit balance allowed on each account is the cardholder credit limit.
After: The most that can be owed an each account is called the cardholder credit limit.
From a typical government document:
Before: “If there are any points on which you require explanation or further particulars we shall be glad to furnish such additional details as may be required by telephone.”
After: “If you have any questions, please phone.”
– Source: Plain English Campaign
“Families are losing their homes because of jargon-filled credit agreements,” says Ms. Maher, an energetic presence in a crocheted sweater and eyeglasses. “Language has been misused and has contributed to the economic disaster.”
An RBS spokesman acknowledged that the wording in the mailing sent to Ms. Maher “was not as clear as it might have been,” and that as a result of her letter, the bank is taking steps to improve the clarity of such pamphlets.
But Ms. Maher says specific regulation is needed. Earlier this year, she wrote to Prime Minister Gordon Brown urging that regulatory bodies such as Britain’s Financial Services Authority establish standards of “plain English” for banks and businesses, and fine them for “churning out…incomprehensible gobbledygook.” A spokesman for Mr. Brown’s office declined to comment on the prime minister’s correspondence.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission codified good writing in 1998 with its Securities Act Rule 421(d) — or in plain English, the “Plain English Rule” — which applies to the cover page for a prospectus. The rule outlines six principles for good writing, including using the “active voice” and not using “multiple negatives.”
In July, Ms. Maher’s group testified before a Parliament committee holding a public hearing on language use in government. Members of the public submitted complaints over what one called “eye-wateringly arcane” language such as “conventional procurement” and “optimism bias” used to describe government financial initiatives. Another lamented the use of the word “investment” when the government means “spending.”
While the clear-language campaign has worked over the years with banks and insurance companies, it was the financial crisis that sent Ms. Maher into the deep weeds of complex financial terms. Her team has sought to crack the meaning of tough nuts like collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs, seeking to break their code by isolating their elements: “We are not pretending that a Plain English definition of CDOs would have saved us from recession,” Ms. Maher’s Web site says. “This is the plain English attempt at defining what is at the heart of CDOs: Collateralized debt obligations are commitments to repay debts that are secured on assets.”
She has also put together a glossary of financial buzzwords including “asset sweat” (making assets work harder and more efficiently). She was initially mystified by the U.K. government’s term “quantitative easing” — the central bank’s effort to put more money into the economy.
“It sounded like something heavy was moving, but what and where?” she says.
Some people think the financial industry has been making a better effort than Ms. Maher gives it credit for.
“I have observed institutions trying very hard over the last 20 years to avoid jargon,” says Chris Higson, a visiting associate professor of accounting at London Business School. But he acknowledges that “there is something about banking and financial services that goes deep to consumers’ sense of anxiety.”
Ms. Maher grew up poor and often hungry in Liverpool and didn’t learn to read until she attended night school at the age of 15. But she says her background motivated her to help ordinary people intimidated by high-level language. “I know what it’s like to feel isolated because of words,” she says.
She began campaigning for clear language in the early 1970s, when she saw that impoverished people in Liverpool were having trouble deciphering benefit forms. She formally started the campaign in 1979, and achieved a success in the 1980s when the government agreed to rewrite thousands of forms.
The group became known for its “Golden Bull” awards for the worst examples of official jargon. Past winners have included a definition from the U.K.’s financial-services watchdog that read, “An unsolicited real time qualifying credit promotion is a real time qualifying credit promotion which is not a solicited real time qualifying credit promotion.” Another winner: a sign at Gatwick Airport saying “Passenger shoe repatriation area only.”
This year, a front-runner is a 102-word sentence issued by a police chiefs association containing phrases such as “authentic answerability” and “amorphous challenges.”
“Amorphous challenges — is that wrestling with a jellyfish, maybe?” the Web site asks.
Soon after founding the campaign, Ms. Maher hired a team of editors and launched a consulting and training service for businesses. Profits go to fund the group’s advocacy activities. Ms. Maher lives on her pension and salary from the campaign’s training and consulting activities.
Ms. Maher also fields questions in the small town of New Mills. About a week ago, a 16-year-old rode his bicycle up to her farmhouse because he wanted to open a checking account but was thrown by terms in the bank’s pamphlet such as AER — or annual equivalent rate, which is an interest rate with annual compound interest.
At a recent gathering for tea and cookies before church, Ms. Maher said, a woman came up to her waving a letter “with minuscule print” about her mortgage and asked for help understanding it. Ms. Maher said it had so many footnotes, asterisks and crosses, “it looked like a game of snakes and ladders and you needed a magnifying glass.”
Some, she says, have given up on banks entirely: “One older lady I know, she took her money and put it in a plastic bag and buried it in the garden.”
—T.W. Farnam contributed to this article.
Write to Sara Schaefer Muñoz at sara.schaefer@wsj.com
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