
The Elements of Bureaucratic Style - samclemens
https://longreads.com/2017/04/12/the-elements-of-bureaucratic-style/
======
ryandrake
The writer of this article put to words something I've noticed constantly
about corporate press releases and news articles, but have not been able to
articulate with such distinctness. The example further down in the article
illustrates this "bureaucratic style" well:

“One Dead in Fremont Officer Involved Shooting”

Officer involved? The wording pretends that the police officer was a prop on
the scene or some uninvolved bystander, rather than a real person who did a
real thing. Re-write it as, "Police officer shoots and kills someone in
Fremont". Much more accurate, but you'd never see a press release like this
because it correctly describes the police officer as the starring role rather
than as a prop in a situation that just spontaneously happened around him.

Think about this style the next time you read some press release where a
company is responding to being accused of bad behavior, you'll see it
everywhere: Anything about the company's actions will passive and it will be
hard to figure out whether anyone in the company actually did anything: "A
situation occurred. Procedures were followed." Conversely, anything about the
accuser will be active and impart agency: "She became uncooperative. He yelled
and acted threatening." It's a deliberate rhetorical tool, and I'm grateful
this article gave it a name and described it so clearly.

~~~
gumby
Actually I'll defend this construction.

Calling it an "officer-involved shooting" (should have a hyphen!) in an
initial report restricts the scope to a just-the-facts-as-we-know-them-m'am
style. Even from the headline I know: 1> where (Fremont), 2> Fatality, 3> cop
was there. Hopefully the first paragraph tells me who shot whom and some macro
facts.

But in an early article or "hot take" it's rarely clear if, for example, a cop
used excessive force, or poorly pressured someone under stress so they took
their own life; if there was legitimate responsibility etc. The passive voice
here preserves the "innocent until proven guilty" position.

If the cop is later convicted of murder I would hope that a subsequent news
article would be more definite ("officer XXX convicted of murder") or
alternatively "Letter: distraught father wanted suicide to be a spectacle"

In fact this is why I am generally uninterested in "news" \-- the amount of
actual data in these early articles is usually quite small. If people are
still talking about it a week later, perhaps it's worth learning about.

~~~
xaa
I agree that news articles shouldn't speculate on motives and whether or not a
shooting was proper in the first few days (with the possible exception of a
neutral expert on these issues, such as the excellent copinthehood.com).

Nevertheless, "officer shoots X" is at least as factual and without spin
(unless X is "victim" or some kind of loaded word).

OP wasn't about news articles, anyway. In this context, the use of OIS from a
precinct press release (i.e., a document not from a neutral observer, but from
a representative of one of the involved parties) looks like an attempt to pre-
emptively disclaim even the possibility of responsibility, which may or may
not exist in any particular case.

------
rdtsc
This is also an interesting study of the origins and evolution of corporate-
speak:
[https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/04/busines...](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/04/business-
speak/361135/)

One of the most active sources of new terms is apparently layoffs. Consulting
companies and CEOs try to one-up each other, perhaps unconsciously, who can
come up with and then own the coolest new term.

Then it starts spreading. CEOs read the same magazines and blogs and then
everyone is using the term. "Hmm, I kinda like how so and so used the term
'circling back' I'll start using it too, it just seems so fresh and cool.
Everyone will be impressed". [1]

I always wonder how people end up writing in that style. Do they actually
think like that, as in for an hour they switch to thinking in corporate-speak,
and later switch back to thinking normally. Or do they think normally and then
translate as they type so "fuck that guy blah blah" becomes "we reached out to
the developer and told them we'll be letting them go".

Imagine the tragedy of a poor CEO stuck in corporate-speak mode, unable to
plainly communicate with family or even order coffee, because nobody
understands them or just thinks they are an asshole.

[1] [http://paulgraham.com/circling.html](http://paulgraham.com/circling.html)

~~~
TeMPOraL
So in other words, it boils down to the usual human "I heard some cool new
phrase in my in-group, I'm gonna start using it"?

~~~
pryelluw
Pretty much. There is always a trend and those trends make you money of you
leverage them. It's a way to exploit the need to belong.

------
tbrownaw
_use of the passive voice to avoid responsibility_

No, it's use of the passive voice to more accurately communicate the outcome
of _a system designed so that_ nobody has responsibility.

Saying that using passive voice is dishonest and evasive is a special case of
shooting the messenger.

~~~
rjeli
Except for especially insidious cases:
[https://m.imgur.com/UUCWStu](https://m.imgur.com/UUCWStu)

~~~
tbrownaw
I don't see the issue with that.

Shortened headlines are _supposed to_ have words elided (so I'd read it as
"[is being] paid"), and newsy stuff tends to be about _now_ which means that
"paid" as past tense doesn't make sense and it would say "pays" (like the main
headline does) if she was the one paying. The sentence ordering (Melania
first, Daily Mail last) is to put the thing people are most interested in at
the beginning.

It's not a case of dishonesty, it's a case of forgetting that most people
don't usually use words that way.

~~~
Bartweiss
I think it's an ugly example of bad headlining, though not 'fake news'. I
_did_ parse it backwards at first because so much had been elided.

BBC does this constantly because their mobile news app uses such short
headlines - they elide all the specifiers and half the verbs, to the point
where what's left is word salad with a handful of key nouns. Annoyingly often,
it's necessary to read a piece just to see what the headline meant in the
first place.

------
calpaterson
If you're interested in this topic, two other books on the same subject from
very different angles:

Life at the Bottom by Theodore Dalrymple
[https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1566635055](https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1566635055)

Eichman in Jerusalam by Hannah Arendt
[https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0143039881/](https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0143039881/)

------
19eightyfour
> The success of politicians like Nigel Farage and Donald Trump come from
> their ability to reject the party line in favor of surprising constructions
> of speech, even as these creations drink from the same poisoned well of dull
> thought.

Many have their theories to explain the current reincarnation of nationalism,
few are prepared to admit they don't know why.

Right now I think such explanations are unhelpful. In their haste to pretend
to understand, I think many prevent themselves from reaching any kind of
usable explanation at all. And the application of their pet world view is more
a shield protecting them from new evidence than a useful tool to help them
understand.

Maybe people would often be better off, just saying, I don't know, and keeping
an open mind.

Aside from that, I like how this article throws some light on how language
encodes power and systems.

If people can be aware of how that works, maybe they won't be so bound by a
discussion that was framed deliberately to disempower them, to prevent
criticism of itself, and to confine their possible responses, and even
imagination of responses to those least effective.

I just don't think anything good can come from systematically disempowering
people. The human spirit always pushes back. Oppression simply guarantees
reaction and conflict. And ends up destroying whatever order that the
oppression was meant to create.

Instead of crushing people into the shape you think is most desirable, I think
things work better when you can inspire them and guide them to take on that
shape, and discover the possibilities of that shape, themselves. Not tyranny,
not anarchy, but some kind of enlightened leadership. I think the American
Dream was a good attempt at this, but maybe it got depleted by over-
emphasizing consumerism, and got knocked off balance by, possibly, spurious,
conflicts that eroded its moral legitimacy, and resulted in the corrosive
self-doubt that stagnated progress and undermined the Dream's appeal.

To reach for a theory, maybe this reincarnation of nationalism is about
trying, somehow, to design a new Dream.

~~~
losteverything
I find myself dissapointed your comment was short. Great read.

<this reincarnation of nationalism is about trying, somehow, to design a new
Dream

American dream was defined by the media, to me. Nationalism was defined by my
mother telling what it was like in 1941. I could not believe that men and
women would actually sign up for war, as they did then. Everybidy did, she
said.

From my ears of viEtnam and tent-cities and matches the last thing that was
was nationalism.

So if this new theory of AD is elusive too, then perhaps nationalism-as-dream
will be realized by a portion of the citizenship.

------
iamleppert
"Let's tease this situation apart."

United Airlines' core concern is for the safety and security of our
passengers. Mr. Dao, a passenger on a recent flight was politely asked to
leave the flight after a safety-critical United employee had to board and take
his place.

The safety and security of all our passengers is paramount at United. After
repeated attempts to disembark, Mr. Dao became belligerent and eventually
posed a safety risk for passengers and crew members, requiring the contact of
the Aviation Police.

The police arrived and handled the situation according to C.R.C 1875.12. At
least two non-physical attempts were made to diffuse the situation before a
physical response was required. Acting in accordance with the law, officers
used a reasonable and warranted amount of force to remove Mr. Dao from his
seat, eliminating the safety risk he posed to United crew and other
passengers, and also to himself.

We thank the officers and United crew for their quick attention to this
matter, which likely prevented further safety and security problems from
arising.

At United, we are committed to the safety and security of all passengers and
crew.

------
GedByrne
'The thrust of these style guides falls back to a weird kind of masculine
virility. The terms themselves—“passive” and “active”—rely heavily on received
tropes of gendered norms, and for that reason alone we should be suspicious of
them.'

Are gender norms really the root of all evil?

Power will corrupt in both patriarchies and matriarchies.

~~~
beaconstudios
that comment strike me as odd too - the terms "active and passive voice" are
due to the passivity or activity of the speaker in the events being described.
It has absolutely nothing to do with gender. If they were called "masculine
and feminine voice" to correspond to the same then the author would have a
case.

------
leggomylibro
I think the author misquoted United's email; I was kind of baffled by this
first statement:

>As you will read, the situation was unfortunately compounded when one of the
passengers was politely asked to deplane refused and it became necessary to
contact Chicago Aviation Officers to help.

The email actually read, "one of the passengers -we- politely asked..."

But that's kind of the problem, isn't it? That the style indignantly defends
itself as polite when it's really a big, "fuck you?"

------
grabcocque
One thing the author didn't mention is, in this case, whatever the intentions
behind Munoz's dismal bit of bureaucratese, it most certainly did not deflect
blame or attention. In fact, the response was so ham-fistedly out of touch
with the response that was needed it made the PR situation way worse.

What's the point of PR-speak if it inflames a situation it's meant to cool?

~~~
closed
> Contains no passive voice.

Passenger is used as the subject, rather than object in your quoted passage.
To see it in active voice, change "one of the passengers was politely
asked...", to "SOME_SUBJECT politely asked one of the passengers...".

I've oversimplified, since it could be argued as active by adding the word
"who",

"one of the passengers who was politely asked to deplane refused..."

but even if that's the case, then the master dodge phrase "it became
necessary" cut SOME_SUBJECT from the second part. Note that the passenger is
not doing the contacting in

"...and it became necessary to contact Chicago Aviation Officers to help."

------
crooked-v
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word)

------
Spooky23
This type of nonsense isn't necessarily evil on its face. It's a theatric
response to the lazy and hysterical approach that the press and other
spectators take with any event.

Communications like this are signals to professionals who speak the jargon. If
you know wtf you are talking about, it's pretty easy to parse the nonsense and
figure out what is actually going on.

If you're in the know about a topic that others aren't, it's easily to spot
these things by looking at the editorial decisions. If there's a new
smartphone, and in the 2 hour keynote address, there's no mention of battery
life improvements... guess what? The battery sucks.

