ABSTRACT
The common style is simple, forceful at its best, and always direct. Civil Service style is characterized by heavy circumlocutions, a love of long words and a set of hackneyed phrases that either mean nothing or are long-winded ways of saying something that could be said much better in a few syllables. The Civil Service letter takes three times as long to say the same thing in ugly, clumsy language of a kind that is alarming and puzzling to uneducated people. Advertising copy is probably the worst English to be found today in print. It is full of exaggerations, the misuse of words, vulgarisms, ugly coinages many trade names are themselves an offence against aesthetics childish jokes, cheap ways of giving emphasis, pseudo-scientific language and other atrocities. Humorous writing can be a fine art; The bad novel is another ever-flowing spring of cheap-and-nasty style.
