WANTED: Jargon buster - reward £10,000

by DOUG COLLIE

Scotland's public spending watchdog is advertising for help from editorial experts to shrink the word count of its reports and to make the documents more readable by 'minimising jargon and passive language'.

Audit Scotland, which employs 290 staff to oversee the accounts of and expenditure by dozens of public bodies including councils and health boards, published a contract notice on Friday which seemed to suggest their reports on a variety of topics require attention.

The notice was headed Plain Language Editing Service and included an estimated value of £10,000 (exclusive of VAT) for a job likely to last for three years. The agency itself spent £29.6 million in 2020/21. including over £20 million for wages and salaries.

According to Audit Scotland: "We require an experienced English-medium editing service that specialises in plain language techniques. The service will deliver editing suggestions that help ensure our audit products are well written in clear language that is easy to understand."

The watchdog does not specify which of their reports has prompted the move to call in the plain speakers. But perhaps this example taken from a recently published Scottish Borders Council Audit Plan for 2020/21 could be a cause for concern:

"Performance materiality – This acts as a trigger point. If the aggregate of errors identified during the financial statements audit exceeds performance materiality this would indicate that further audit procedures should be considered. Using our professional judgement, we have calculated performance materiality at 60% of planning materiality."

Work that one out!

Or perhaps candidates for the lucrative contract might wish to wrestle with this extract from Audit Scotland's Best Value Assurance Report on the Borders council, published in 2019:

"The council now needs to make better progress with its community planning partners in delivering crucial elements of their community empowerment obligations, including resourced locality plans which identify community need and help community wellbeing."

Hopefully, the successful contractors will be able to sort things out.

Whoever they are will be expected to deliver all of the following:

"We need a confidential, reliable, flexible and resilient editing service. The supplier will provide one or more editors who will personally review our confidential draft reports and:

"Suggest plain language edits to improve readability and structure. For example: minimising jargon and passive language, supporting simple and direct sentences.

"Make suggestions for tightening our report writing by shrinking the word count, ensuring this does not change the key messages and meaning of the report.

"Advise on compliance with Audit Scotland’s house style guide, including our report-writing style guide, to support high standards of syntax, grammar and punctuation. However, the overall focus of the editing service should be more on plain language advice than general proofreading."

It is unfair to single out Audit Scotland as the exemplar of jargon and gobbledygook. For there are glaring examples of opaqueness in written work churned out by many a public organisation.

Here, for instance, is a passage from a report entitled Place Making - The Next Steps which will be given due consideration by councillors at a local authority meeting here in the Borders later this week:

 "The aim of the proposals set out in this report is to make the Place Principle a reality for people in our communities and provide a baseline for how we recognise and value the importance of place in the way decisions are made. It provides a challenge to the assumptions that are made about places without community participation. It does this by asking for answers to straightforward questions before decisions are taken about what to do and what to stop doing."

You couldn't make it up!