Doublespeak. William Lutz

Estimated Form Complexity Variable” and “Elaborating the Relationship Between TV Viewing and Beliefs About the Real World: Possible Contingent Variables.” Or, if you had attended the 1988 meeting of the Academy of Management, you could have heard this paper presented: “Enter and Die: Effects of Incumbents’ Waiting Periods on the Duration of Industry Entrants’ Participation in 5 Subfields of the Medical Diagnostic Imaging Industry (1959–1986).”

      At the annual meeting of the Mid-South Educational Research Association in 1985, a paper on reading comprehension among Navy recruits included this sentence: “The inferential analysis on high school graduation status indicates that higher percentages of high school graduates are included among the recruits during and immediately following the periods of enlistment restrictions to primary high school graduates.”

      At the 1988 conference of the American Sociological Association, one panelist said that “In the emphasis on diversity, the notion of a hegemonic sexual discourse is deconstructed, even among those who claim to have one.” The speaker then went on to say that the “exploration of sexuality within feminism is attentive to the postmodern concern with the multiplying mutations of the self.” Other phrases that popped up were “democratic hegemony,” “distributionally conservative notions,” “inequalities in the sex-gender system,” and the “discourse of status ambivalence in clothing and fashion.”

      In 1987 Princeton University Press published The State and Social Transformation in Tunisia and Libya, 1830–1980, by Lisa Anderson, a book whose prose is illustrated by this sample sentence:

      It is also an argument for taking the variation in the periphery as a starting point for investigation and, more importantly, for examining the historical interaction of indigenous and foreign notions of political authority, structures of domination and mechanisms of appropriation as they combine to create the unprecedented circumstances and institutions of politics in the modern periphery.

      It’s probably not surprising to learn that teachers like that kind of writing. Although English teachers like to say they prefer the clear, simple style in writing, when given a choice they tend to choose the heavy, ponderous style. In the September 1981 issue of College English, a journal read by a great number of college writing teachers, Professors Rosemary Hake of Chicago State University and Joseph Williams of the University of Chicago reported on research in which they asked English teachers in high schools and colleges to judge groups of student essays. In each group of essays, Hake and Williams included several pairs of essays that differed only in their style.

      The results were depressing. The teachers consistently preferred the essays that had sentences such as, “The absence of priorities and other pertinent data had the result of the preclusion of state office determinations as to the effectiveness of the committee’s actions in targeting funds to the areas in greatest need of program assistance.” The teachers consistently gave lower ratings to the essays that were written with sentences such as this: “Because the state office set no priorities and did not have pertinent data, it could not determine how effectively the committee targeted funds to those areas whose programs most needed assistance.” Both of these sentences say the same thing, only the second says it more directly and more clearly. It has all the attributes teachers say good writing should have. Yet teachers overwhelmingly chose the first sentence over the second. Even those of us who should know better can be lured by the siren song of doublespeak.

      At times it seems as if everyone involved in education lives on doublespeak, which starts at the top and flows downward. The Omnibus Education Act, passed by the Florida State Legislature in 1984, changed some terminology in the Florida statutes dealing with remedial education. In place of “remedial and developmental instruction” there is now “college preparatory instruction,” while “remediation” has become “additional preparation” and “remedial courses” has become “college preparatory adult education” or “college preparatory instruction.” At its October 1986 meeting, the State Board of Education in Ohio adopted a series of recommendations presented by its literacy committee, including these: “As early as a student is identified as an underachiever, an individualized intervention program with multiple teaching approaches should be developed” and, “An ongoing marketing approach should be implemented to provide the outreach necessary to find the unserved adult illiterate population.”

      The Troy, New York School Board passed the following resolution at one of its meetings in 1983: “Resolved, that the Superintendent be authorized to engage a consultant in public school administration for the purpose of assisting the Superintendent to plan a study to make specific recommendations in regard to the planning for management use and allocation of personnel and material resources particularly in the following areas. . . .” In 1984 the Amarillo, Texas Independent School District Board of Trustees hired two consultants to help in the search for a new school superintendent. The consultants wrote a public opinion survey that contained such sentences as these: “Each item in the instrument is productivity-oriented. Pupil Products expected are itemized first. Production Systems present in the district are itemized second.” The National Testing Service Research Corporation of Durham, North Carolina prepared a report in 1980 on the results of a program designed to attack functional illiteracy among adults. The quality of this report can be illustrated by this sample of the prose used in the report: “The conceptual framework for this evaluation posits a set of determinants of implementation which explains variations in the level of implementation of the Comprehensive Project. . . .”

      The doublespeak flows also into the classroom, with textbooks, lectures, and course materials filled with it. The following is the description of a graduate course in anthropology at the City University of New York:

      As macro-processual interpretations come increasingly to seem, to historians, to falsify the complex multidirectionalities of local-level phenomena, and as community-based ethnographies come increasingly, in anthropology, to be situated within these same macro-processes, the framework for a synthesis between anthropology and history that has been building over the past twenty years, and that has achieved some substantial success, is starting to come apart, and is doing so in ways that can not be remedied by a return to earlier, more particularistic concerns.

      Potsdam College of the State University of New York offers a course called “Clinical Techniques in the Human Services,” which is described as focusing on “Theory and issues regarding clinical practice with major processes in human services including contingency management, supportive therapy, assertiveness training, systematic desensitization and cognitive restructuring.” The description for the “Nursing II” course at Rutgers University, Camden, New Jersey states that the course “focuses on the care of clients throughout the life cycle who have basic alternations in health status. Stresses a multidimentional approach and encompasses . . . the amelioration of the health status of the client. The restoration of health a major focus.”

      At least the people in the St. Vrain Valley School District could translate their doublespeak. Most users of education doublespeak don’t have the faintest idea what they’re talking about when they use doublespeak. They sure sound impressive, though, enough so that you would never dare question what it is they’re saying lest you appear ignorant and uninformed. Many of those who use doublespeak hope for this reaction. When one school board voted to deny funds for a new swimming pool, the high school principal simply submitted a proposal for an “Aquatic therapy department” for handicapped children and promptly got his new swimming pool.

      Remember the old days when there were physical education classes? Well, physical education is out of date; it’s now called “human kinetics” or “applied life studies.” Sports are called “movement exercises.” In 1988, officials of the University of Minnesota School of Physical Education wanted to rename their school the School of Human Movement and Leisure Studies. Michael Wade, the school’s director, defended the proposed name change by explaining that other universities call their phys ed schools by such impressive names as “School of Kinesiology” or “School of Sport Exercise Science.” (After all, Colorado State University changed the name of its phys ed department to the “Exercise and Sports Science Department” in 1986.) Wade noted that the old name put his faculty at a disadvantage when seeking grants, since the name of his school was not as impressive as the names