A friend recent suggested that I read a book entitled “Death Sentence – The Decay of Public Language”. It’s an excellent book written by Don Watson, a former speech writer for former Prime Minister of Australia, Paul Keating. As I said, it’s an excellent book and one I recommend wholeheartedly to anybody who uses language in daily life. That’s right.

I decided while reading this that I should do a short blog post when I come across the type of language Don Watson discusses in his book. I just found an example on the website of the Australian federal department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities. The department’s name in itself probably qualifies as an example of the poor use of English. Today though, I wanted to highlight the following paragraph on the homepage of the department:

Australia has actively engaged in the preparatory process for Rio+20 to date. The Rio+20 Conference is an important step in ongoing international efforts to accelerate progress towards achieving sustainable development globally.

How do I think this sentence should be written?  As follows:

Australia has participated in the preparatory process for Rio+20. The Rio+20 Conference is an important meeting to facilitate international communication about sustainable development.

I don’t know if Don Watson would take aim at the original wording but the reasons I didn’t like it include:

• The phrase “actively engaged”.
• The superfluous use of “to date”.
• ‘An important step’, ‘ongoing’ and ‘efforts’, all of which have close to no meaning but sound good.
• To ‘accelerate progress towards achieving’ just riles me.
• The notion of “achieving sustainable development globally” riles me too.  It’s a lofty but empty vision.