Prescriptive Linguistics and Plain English: The Case of "Whiz-deletions"

Abstract

The plain English movement is under considerable pressure to produce simple, easy-to-apply guidelines for writers. Often, however, such guidelines are not consistent with the actual practices of good writers and are therefore ineffective. As a case in point, this paper discusses the guideline "Avoid whiz-deletions," taken from a highly-acclaimed plain English handbook. It is shown that whiz-deletions, or reduced relative clauses, actually abound in good writing. They outnumber full relative clauses by a 4-to-1 margin in good standard prose and by an 8-to-1 margin in model plain English documents. Whiz-deletions are useful in helping to de-emphasize information, promote sentence rhythm, facilitate parsing, avoid ambiguity, and omit needless words. The maxim in its original form should be replaced by a more descriptively-accurate one that reflects these features. In general, the plain English movement should promote only those guidelines that are consistent with the practices of good writers. Furthermore, such guidelines should be formulated so as to direct the attention of novice writers to broader contextual factors, not just sentence-based ones.