PREACHING the gospel of plain language is a hard task within the European Union, a set of institutions famed for their serpentine sentences and eurocratic waffle. The Commission's Clear Writing Campaign is trying a different tack: it is using the power of song to garner support for its initiative. “Good news—clarity's a-coming!” extol choristers from the Hot Air Ensemble in jouncing Harlemesque euphony, in a clip that the campaign has posted on YouTube. Unfortunately, with fewer than 4,000 views at the time of writing, few of the Commission's 25,000-odd employees seem to have watched it.

The Clear Writing Campaign, launched in March last year, is the Commission's latest attempt to spruce up its communication. It made laudable efforts to improve after the launch of the Fight the Fog initiative, back in 1998, by providing “citizens' summaries” of policy documents and creating an in-house editing unit. But the persistence of official obfuscation, and the previous campaign's exclusive focus on English, left room for improvement. Now, the linguistic spring-clean is set to encompass 23 of the Commission's working languages—although that move seems largely political, since the majority of text at the Commission is written in English before being translated.

Which goes to the heart of the problem: few drafters are crafting their documents in a language they grew up with. A survey of 6,000 Commission employees found that 95% wrote in English, but only 13% of those were native speakers. Over half said that they rarely or never ran their documents by someone whose mother tongue was English. Although editing is available, it seems few employees take advantage of it, probably because of work pressures and time constraints. In these circumstances, nasty neologisms and unwieldy constructions are inevitable.

The hilarity of some of the slip-ups gives this clash of tongues a silver lining. Mistakes are often the result of “false friends”—words or phrases in English that bear a deceptive resemblance to some linguistic cousin. Some recent corkers from the Commission's sin bin: "fundamental tenants" (as in “of the Treaty”), "pollution hotpots" (for hotspots), "exogenous socks" (instead of “shocks,” as in to the economy), and "civil society can only scrutinise government action where it disposes of key information" (in a policy document about corruption, where “dispose” is meant to mean “make available,” like its equivalents in Latin-based languages).

Does it matter? New times may indeed call for new words; and even when saying things in new ways does not add to the pool of meaning, loose language has its uses. A sociologist might point out that jargon, like slang or a local dialect, lets people demonstrate that they belong somewhere. Members of a profession or “sector,” from finance to foreign aid, show that they can walk the walk by talking the talk of “frameworks,” “optics” and “going-forwards.” For hard-nosed diplomats, vague wording is sometimes necessary to get the parties to sign up to international agreements, because it gives a country wriggle-room to interpret its obligations. The anaemic Copenhagen Accord of 2009, for example, was the result of trying a find a form of words that stressed participating countries' commitment to confronting climate change, while concealing differences in the depth of those commitments.

But bad language comes at a cost. In a recent report, the Task Force administering the Clear Writing Campaign wrote that “unclear documents waste time and resources,” and went on to say that “[p]oorly drafted texts may give rise to difficulties in the correct application of EU law and can generate bad publicity.” In Britain, a 2009 report from a parliamentary committee found that jargonistic weasel-words allowed policymakers to compensate for unclear thoughts and disguise the impact of their proposals. It also found that “officialese” alienates people from organs of government, and discourages them from gaining access to legitimate benefits and services. Such criticisms seem apt to apply to international institutions, too.

“There's a lot of bad English about,” says Emma Wagner, a longstanding Commission translator and a member of the task force that is managing the Clear Writing campaign. “People who can speak it can't necessarily write it well, and often struggle with the register they should use.” Others complain that English is a language that is easy to speak to a minimum level of intelligibility, but difficult to master—although David Crystal, a pre-eminent English language expert, disagrees. People who make this criticism tend be “comparing English with languages which have more word endings, such as French or German,” he says. “But the point is, they're thinking of grammar, when they say this, not vocabulary, and waffle is more to do with vocab.”

Widening the EU to include Austria, Finland and Sweden made the problems worse, according to Ms Wagner. Prior to enlargement, French held sway; afterwards, the new countries tilted the balance towards English, reflecting the particular abilities of their own polyglot citizens. Expansion effectively turned the drafting part of the Commission's work into a monolingual enterprise. The addition of countries from Eastern and Central Europe in 2004 cemented this development. In another report for the Clear Writing Campaign, Ms Wagner writes that “The major EU enlargement was a fantastic achievement for democracy and for Europe, but it brought two problems for drafting in the Commission: the continued rise of bad English as the Commission's lingua franca, and the massive influx of new staff who naturally adopted the prevailing in-house style, rather than trying to reform it.”

Technology can be a bugbear too. Computers have made documents much more long-winded, says Ms Wagner, since the ease with which one can cut and paste from templates diminishes the cost of lugubrious phrasing. The considerable number of English-drafting French-speakers often use long sentences, reflecting the wordier constructions of their own language. And the preponderance of lawyerly jargon in Brussels means that documents tend towards the opaque. Translators complain about interfering managers who tinker with text, simply to make their mark—“like dogs pissing against a tree”, as one Commission employee and clear writing advocate remarked. But at least the managers are on-side: during Fight the Fog, they were wary that the project was attempting to “dumb-down” their role; now, says Ms Wagner, they seem to appreciate the importance of improving their prose.

So what is to be done? The proposals of the Campaign's task force are thoroughgoing, but it has not yet decided whether to take any of them up. They include: putting word limits on commission documents; making editing compulsory; holding outsiders' reports to rigorous internal standards; recruiting people with better drafting skills; giving better training and assistance to authors; and providing a system of rewards for clear writing.

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) might be a good model. It has hired a distinguished former BBC journalist, Jonathan Charles, to head up its Communications department. “We're the thought police,” he says. He sees waffle-blasting as a constant battle; “you have to be passionate about clarity.” All EBRD's reports are read by a team of dedicated editors, who boil down the technicalities to their simplest form in a rigorous sub-editing process. Mr Charles' clarity litmus-test is whether something would make sense to someone who wasn't a native speaker familiar with English slang. So, the straight-talking foreword of a recent EBRD report on climate change reads:

The 2010 summer saw forest fires and poor harvests, the threat of a melting taiga and conflicts over diminishing water resources in the EBRD region. These served as a wakeup call; until then, the region had the lowest levels of public awareness of climate change in the world. This was a legacy, no doubt, of its history of central planning, with its cheap energy and chronic environmental neglect.

For international organisations, the trick to breaking the jargon-trap might be to hire non-experts, who are not yet anaesthetised to the painful language of international policy-speak. Another approach would be to give incentives for people to get their work edited, or indeed to make it mandatory. A third would be to encourage drafters to write in their native tongue, and to have it competently translated. What would you do?