Government officials, and their private sector counterparts, need to learn to talk and write like people instead of like bureaucrats.
My job requires me to read a lot of press releases. Most of them are dreadful.
Here’s one example from a recent press release issued by the California Department of Public Health:
“The California Department of Public Health on March 11 announced the release of the Behavioral Health Services Act Population Based Prevention Final Plan.”
Translation: The state government released a suicide prevention plan.
That’s a worthy goal—a pity the effort is being undermined by lousy communication. Most people won’t know what behavioral health means and won’t take the time to look it up.
I know that suicide is an unpleasant, even scary, subject. A class I took on how to report on suicide recommended avoiding that word in a headline.
Ahem. I once had a supervisor who forbid me to run the suicide prevention hotline in a newspaper because he thought seeing the words “suicide prevention” would make someone suicidal.
Frankly, having battled clinical depression in my teens, I strongly disagree with that kind of “reasoning”. That’s like avoiding the word “cancer” on the assumption it won’t kill people if we don’t use the C word.
When I was 38, doctors told me I had a growth, a mass, a tumor, a seminoma. It was two weeks before my urologist said, “It’s a cancer” and I felt relieved. Now I knew what I was fighting.
Calling suicide prevention “behavioral health” doesn’t actually say anything—let alone save lives.
“Engagement” is a popular term in government and corporate circles. According to Merriam-Webster, there are at least six definitions of the word: arranging to meet someone (also called an “appointment” or a “date”), giving someone a job (which governors and presidents called “appointments”), being engaged to get married, an emotional involvement with someone (which most folks call a “commitment” or a “relationship”), being in gear, or combat (also known as a “hostile encounter between military forces”).
In the media and the government, “engagement” also means communicating with people. Some news organizations have an “engagement editor” who usually is involved in social media updates—combining the work of distributing the news to the audience with drawing the audience to the news organization.
Police are usually, for the most part, better at this sort of thing than most government officials. They may “arrest a suspect” or “take someone into custody,” but they don’t “apprehend and incarcerate an alleged miscreant” unless they’re poking fun at somebody. That’s because cops spend so much time speaking to civilians that they know how to talk to civilians rather than around civilians or over their heads.
Other government officials would benefit from trying their hand at speaking civilian. Sadly, too many officials seem to define “transparency” as using as much jargon as possible. They are confusing the definition of “transparent” with the definition of “opaque”. Opaque transparency isn’t transparent at all. You’re human beings. Talk like human beings already.
Charles M. Kelly is associate editor of the Sun. He is also a grouch.
