We can do without these words: investigating prescriptive attitudes to meaning in a specialised discourse

This chapter deals with a Style Guide written in 2013 for the British Civil Service. It included a list of words to avoid, from the difficult and vague, to the metaphorical. Viewing the Style Guide as a genuine attempt to resolve problems with the Civil Service’s notoriously convoluted prose style, the study compares and contrasts the proscribed words with their use in the very documents that it was aimed to improve – online policy documents. It highlights discrepancies that are known to exist between the “proper” meanings of words and those that are found in the texts, and also reveals how comprehension problems are not just caused by lexis (metaphor in particular), but also by unusual or unexpected syntactical patternings.