I was reading a book INDLISH: The Book for Every English-Speaking Indian by Jyoti Sanyal. Indlish is a compilation of Sanyal’s articles on plain English first printed in his column in The Statesman. Sanyal was formerly Dean of Asian College of Journalism, Bangalore, and an assistant editor with The Statesman, Calcutta. Now he is part of Clear English India, which encourages people to use good contemporary English instead of Raj-day commercialese, officialese, and legalese.
It is a great book that makes a lot of sense. It is easy-to-read, witty, clear, and concise. The author practices what he preaches. As the title says, it is a book that should be read by every English-speaking Indian. It is full of good advice about how to write English that is easy-to-read and easy-to-understand.
The book gives a lot of examples of verbose and pompous English writing. It illustrates the abuse of the language—both intentional and accidental. It also points out why we (Indians) remain bound to literary Victorian English, which the later Victorians rejected. It explains how our East India Company legacy of commercialese fetters how we write English.
The book discusses the various ways the English language is abused. It provides clear and practical solutions to avoid the traps that obfuscates and makes our writing incomprehensible. It uses real world examples from LIC policy documents, newspaper and magazine reports, editorials, television reporting, etc. to show how the language is abused and how to correct those mistakes.
The book quotes the Fowler brothers—Henry Watson Fowler and Francis George Fowler—authors of The King’s English. The Fowler brothers were great advocates of plain English. They told aspiring writers to be direct, simple, brief, vigorous, and lucid and to:
Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched.
Prefer the concrete word to the abstract.
Prefer the single word to the circumlocution.
Prefer the short word to the long.
Prefer the English word to the ones derived or borrowed from Italian, French and Spanish.
According to the author, if we must have a mantra for good writing, let those rules laid down by Henry and Frank Flower serve.
The book gives a lot of practical ideas that will improve one’s communication making it clearer, crispier and more interesting. A good read…