6 stationery that poison your speech

Korney Chukovsky was the first to talk about the office clerk in his book "Alive as Life". He invented this word by analogy with the names of diseases (meningitis, colitis) and believed that the disease is also a clerk, only the living language suffers here, which is supplanted by bureaucratic turns.

Then translator Nora Gal wrote about the office. She, too, was very categorical: in her book "The Word Living and the Dead" there is a whole chapter "Beware of the office!" The editor Maxim Ilyakhov, co-author of the book "Write, cut down" and the founder of the "Glavred" service, also recommends to refuse it.

The office is only suitable for the official business style: laws, statements and other documents. It overloads speech and prevents us from understanding each other. Here are some examples of words and phrases that you might want to avoid.

1. The decision was made

Alternative: we decided.

The decision does not make itself - there are direct participants in this process. So why get rid of them and displace active circulation by passive ones? When the subject disappears from the sentence, the construction becomes impersonal, dry and unwieldy. For official documents, this is fine, but in a story, article or announcement it will not look very good. If there are many such phrases in the text, it will be difficult to finish reading it.

2. Provide assistance

Alternative: to help.

When it comes to important things, we want to give our words solidity. It seems that to say “volunteers help to find the missing” is somehow too easy. Therefore, we take the predicate "to help" and split it into two words: "to provide help." And before our eyes, instead of volunteers who are looking for a missing child in the rain in the rain, only meaningless words remain.

3. Check

Alternative: check.

For some reason, the office clerk does not like verbs very much and turns them, say, into verbal nouns. As a result, the action seems to leave the sentence, the phrase becomes motionless and boring. Although it happens that verbal nouns are still needed and their use is justified. For example, it is better to write “I paid for my studies” rather than “I paid money to study”. So we are not urging you to completely abandon such words - just try not to get carried away.

4. In order to improve the quality of service

Alternative: so that we can help you more effectively.

You have probably heard this phrase more than once when you called the call center: "In order to improve the quality of service, your conversation may be recorded." This is a stylistic mistake called case stringing. We make a sentence from nouns in the same case - genitive, instrumental, dative, or prepositional. The result can be an unimaginable jumble, which is sometimes impossible to understand the first time, for example: "The speech was greeted by the guests with loud applause." It is not at all clear who met what and how.

To avoid this situation, try to use different parts of speech and case forms of nouns. Perhaps it will be easier to understand the sentence this way: "After his speech, the guests applauded noisily."

5. Properly

Alternative: right, good, right.

Such cliches make speech obscure and unnatural. For example, “doing a job well” sounds much easier than “doing your job properly”. And “I write for the Lifehacker” is preferable to the bombastic “I am the author”.

6. To avoid, in accordance with

Alternative: build a phrase without them.

Oh, those awful excuses. Most often, they give speech a bureaucratic, bureaucratic tone. Take, for example, this sentence: "In order to avoid road accidents, it was decided to install additional traffic lights." The thought can be expressed much more simply: "The city administration decided to put up new traffic lights so that there would be fewer accidents."

Or the textbook example of Korney Chukovsky: “The creative processing of the image of the courtyard goes along the line of intensifying the display of the tragedy of his fate …” You hardly understood something after the first reading, because almost all varieties of bureaucrats are gathered here. Therefore, it is better not to get carried away with them.