Brevity is the soul of wit, but not of council’s reports

CORNWALL Council officers have been asked to write in “plain English” after members were invited to discuss a report aiming to “encompass stakeholder views on a partnerships strategy integrating inclusive building blocks to commission devolved resource-aligned skills under a wider skills landscape”.

This is unfair: or, to put it more clearly, there is a quantifiable equity gap.

The unitary authority’s salaried personpower complement has to interact with a sufficiently challenging diurnal operational ecosystem as it is without elected representatives taxing them with super-optimal loquacity in their mode of data delivery.

As the old saying goes, cascading key concepts to the executive in such a way as to facilitate holistic knowledge transfer – particularly when sharing details of ramified process matrices incorporating multiple variables – generates demand for higher-order semantic precision at all tiers of the decision pyramid.

The organisational risk instantiated here, one need hardly add, is that while opting for a pseudo-vernacular or quasi-demotic language model may simulate a semblance of syntactic synchronicity this can never be more than superficial, since by propagating verbal indeterminacy at both the micro and macro scales it has the potential to exacerbate rather than diminish the deficit in mutual comprehension.

Given such a disjunction, it’s inevitable that lacunae will arise for which each party will tend to inculpate the other, for being obscure on the one hand or obtuse on the other.

How, if at all, can these antagonistic instincts – accuracy versus accessibility – be reconciled, I hear you ask?

Clearly what’s required is an exhaustive investigation into how the council’s communications can be clarified, delegated to a dedicated working group representing all levels of the organisation, with a title which reflects its role: “Multilateral Lexical Transpicuity Commission” has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?