The Elements of Bureaucratic Style
https://longreads.com/2017/04/12/the-elements-of-bureaucratic-...
The Elements of Bureaucratic Style
The bureaucratic voice presents governments and corporations as placid, apologetic, and
unmovable. It also makes their victims as active as possible.
A United Airlines jets sits at the gate at Denver International Airport. (AP Photo/David Boe)
Colin Dickey | Longreads | April 2017 | 12 minutes | 3000 words
On Monday night, Oscar Munoz, the CEO of United Airlines, sent an internal
email to his staff regarding the incident on Flight 3411 in which members of
Chicago Aviation Security forcibly removed a customer who refused to give up his
seat when asked. In the note, Munoz offered an explanation of events and a defense
of both his employees and law enforcement. The email ended up on Twitter where
its contents were roundly excoriated.
Munoz’s email is, in its own way, a work of art; a triumph of the willingness to pass
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the buck. It misstates objective facts and shifts responsibility onto the passenger,
David Dao, who ended up bloody and dazed after the encounter.
As you will read, the situation was unfortunately compounded when one of
the passengers was politely asked to deplane refused and it became necessary
to contact Chicago Aviation Officers to help.
What struck me as I read the email is how a careful and consistent use of syntax,
grammar, and diction is marshaled to make a series of points both subtle and
unsubtle. On Twitter, I referred to it as a “master class in the use of the passive
voice to avoid responsibility,” and followed with a few tweets that highlighted its
use of language to shift the blame on to the victim.
The thread landed, at some point, in the Twitter feed of a British writer named
Oliver Kamm, the author of Accidence Will Happen: A Recovering Pedant’s Guide to
English Language and Style. Kamm responded that my grammatical analysis was
“way out,” and over several tweets accused me of misunderstanding the passive
voice and its usage in Munoz’s email. (Kamm was right in many of his criticisms: I
used the phrase “it became necessary” as an example of the passive voice, which is
incorrect, and in my haste I referred to “passive verbs” rather than the passive
voice.)
What became clear to me in this exchange is that the passive voice is itself unsuited
for the lexical landscape of United’s email, which itself is part of a larger world we
now find ourselves in, where corporate and government bureaucracies rely heavily
on language to shape our perception. Munoz’s email relies heavily on the passive
voice to evade culpability, but he also employs a host of other rhetorical moves that
collude to put the blame on the man who was assaulted and carried out on a
stretcher. Like a well-trained bureaucrat, Munoz used an array of syntactical
choices in a predictable, quantifiable, and deliberate manner, and it’s time we
recognize it for what it is.
***
When George Orwell wrote “Politics and the English Language” in 1946, he began
by arguing that the English language was “in a bad way,” decaying decadently due
to jargon, cliché, and imprecise thought. His examples of poor writing exhibit two
main faults: “staleness of imagery” and a “lack of precision.” “The writer either has
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a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is
almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not.” Orwell saw the
writing of his day as consisting in “gumming together long strips of words which
have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable
by sheer humbug,” and saw its decline as directly traceable to its lack of
imagination.
The English language today is not, I would argue, in decline; it’s vibrant and
flowering in multiple directions. For all its shortcomings, social media has allowed
for a wide range of inventiveness of linguistic expression—the dizzying speed at
which slang moves on the Internet is a testament to the continued vitality of
language’s ability to capture an increasingly wide array of emotional contours of
daily life.
But as users become more creative in crafting language to reflect new kinds of
expression, bureaucrats get more creative in using that expression to hide the
levers of power. In Orwell’s time political writing was bad because it never strayed
from the party line: “It is broadly true that political writing is bad writing….
Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style.” In the
twenty-first century, political writing is bad because it spews bullshit in new
directions, always expanding its inventiveness and the reach of its perfidy. The
success of politicians like Nigel Farage and Donald Trump come from their ability
to reject the party line in favor of surprising constructions of speech, even as these
creations drink from the same poisoned well of dull thought.
Just as rhetoric should no longer be memorized by rote and passed down to
students, bureaucracy no longer moves along predictable party lines. Political
speech continues to be, as it was for Orwell, largely the defense of the indefensible,
but there is no longer a one-to-one correspondence between evil thought and
uninspired diction—ensuring fresh diction among students will not ensure fresh
thought. We think of “Orwellian” as a shorthand for dystopia, but a more accurate
definition might be a form of language whose fidelity is to institutional power at
the expense of objective truth: Expect it to be constantly in flux, particularly in a
landscape where political power is itself nebulous.
It’s time to move beyond the debate between passive and active voice in favor of
something more responsive to the fluid nature of contemporary political language.
Discussions of the passive voice have been bogged down in a war of style guides,
each jockeying for supremacy in the coveted slot of required college composition
textbook.
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As I’ve written elsewhere, the thrust of these style guides falls back to a weird kind
of masculine virility. The terms themselves—“passive” and “active”—rely heavily
on received tropes of gendered norms, and for that reason alone we should be
suspicious of them. So while I’m in agreement with that composition teachers and
style guides should refrain from unyielding denunciations of the passive voice,
there is a difference between a first-year college student’s essay and an email from
the CEO of a multi-billion dollar corporation, just as there is a difference between
our responsibilities as writers and our responsibilities as readers.
***
I’ll admit now that Munoz’s email is not, as I suggested on social media, a perfect
use of the passive voice. What it is instead is a perfect example of the bureaucratic
voice. The bureaucratic voice makes use of both active and passive constructions,
but its purpose is uniform: to erase and efface any active agent on the part of the
bureaucracy. Reading through his email, numerous sentences leap out—their
syntax varies, but their purpose does not.
To begin with, the bureaucratic style works to erase cause. Here is Munoz’s
description of the start of the incident: “On Sunday, April 9, after United Express
Flight 3411 was fully boarded, United’s gate agents were approached by
crewmembers that were told they needed to board the flight.” Setting aside the
passengers for a second, in this sentence there are two named actors: the gate
agents and the crewmembers. You might expect, then, that this all started when the
crewmembers approached the gate agents and told them they needed to board the
flight. However, a closer reading of the syntax implies this is not the case; the
crewmembers themselves “were told they needed to board the flight.” Who told
them? The sentence does not make this clear, even though it is this unnamed actor,
presumably a supervisor, who set this entire chain of events in motion. Deliberately
pushed back as far off the stage as possible, there is no one here to responsibly hold
accountable for subsequent events.
Munoz repeatedly makes reference to established procedures: “Our employees
followed established procedures for dealing with situations like this.” Here we have
what seems to be a nice use of the active voice: We have actors (“our employees”)
and they are doing something specific. But the figures responsible for establishing
procedure are nowhere to be found. Whenever possible, bureaucratic style will
shift responsibility to immutable rules and directives that appear spontaneously
from the ether.
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When bureaucratic agency is absolutely unavoidable it will be couched in a
simpering use of adverbs to clear any wrongdoing: “We politely asked” a customer
to deplane, to whom “we approached… to explain apologetically,” and so forth.
Only with the utmost reluctance does the state ever act, and even then it does so
patiently, politely, apologetically.
Add to this the free use of obvious falsehoods. Munoz states that employees told
Dao “was being denied boarding,” when in fact he was already sitting on the plane.
Munoz claims employees were following United’s “involuntary denial of boarding
process,” but their Denied Boarding Compensation rules cover oversold flights,
and this flight was not oversold or overbooked.
In contrast, Dao himself is portrayed with a dynamic and active voice. The
passenger “defied Chicago Aviation Security Officers,” he “raised his voice and
refused to comply with crew member instructions,” he “repeatedly declined to
leave,” and after he was forcibly removed, “he continued to resist—running back
onto the aircraft in defiance of both our crew and security officials.” While the
bureaucratic voice works to present governments and corporations as placid,
apologetic, and unmovable, it also works to make their victims as active and vital as
possible. The point, of course, is to make clear that a victim like Dao did this to
himself.
Munoz employs the passive voice at key moments to make it clear that there are no
other actors in this drama other than Dao. In a one spectacular sentence, Munoz
writes of Dao, “He was approached a few more times after that in order to gain his
compliance to come off the aircraft, and each time he refused and became more
and more disruptive and belligerent.” There is clearly a series of confrontations
happening here, yet he is the only individual identified in the entire sentence. No
one did the approaching and no one tried to gain his compliance; instead, the
passenger just sat there on the plane, becoming more and more belligerent all by
himself.
While the bureaucratic voice works to present governments
and corporations as placid, apologetic, and unmovable, it
also works to make their victims as active and vital as
possible. The point, of course, is to make clear that a victim
like Dao did this to himself.”
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All of this builds towards the arrival of the Chicago Aviation Security officers.
These figures are inevitably portrayed as accomplices, never direct initiators:
United called them to “assist in removing the customer from the flight,” and they
were only there “to help.” Even though one officer has already been placed on leave
following the incident, none of them will at any time be held responsible, since
their purpose here is only in “assisting” the bureaucracy.
In Munoz’s entire statement, this sentence stands out as the most chilling: “Our
agents were left with no choice but to call Chicago Aviation Security Officers to
assist in removing the customer from the flight. He repeatedly declined to leave.”
The phrase, “left with no choice” is calculated and deliberate, and every rhetorical
move of the preceding paragraphs is leading up to this moment. The bureaucratic
state never acts of its own volition; it is always reactionary, and it always acts
because the victim leaves it no choice. The mind, of course, reels with all of the
choices available to United’s management in this instance: offering a higher
compensation figure until someone agreed, transporting the crew to Louisville on
another plane, acceding to Dao’s request that, as a doctor, he had patients to see the
following morning and deserved priority, or simply waiting. But once this became
a display of power and authority, they were left with no choice but violence.
The effect of United’s email is the onslaught of evasion to create an overall
impression that the actions of the airline and its employees was out of their hands;
that Dao, as the only autonomous and culpable figure in the drama, brought this on
himself, and that the ensuing violence, while regrettable, was unavoidable. The
more violence done to an individual, the more active agency he or she will be given
by the bureaucratic voice, and the more removed and abstract the bureaucracy
itself will become. When descriptions of violence are unavoidable, they will
emphatically be in passive constructions: dissidents “were executed,” their bodies
“were later found” and subsequently “were buried.”
An uninformed person could read this email and think that nothing United did was
wrong—because it appears United did nothing at all.
***
Yesterday, Munoz released a second email, one which was far more direct and
apologetic. Whether this will stem this news cycle remains to be seen, but either
way, the point is not Munoz or United Airlines, but the way this simple email
exemplifies a rhetoric that has infected our language at every level. If there is a
singular, shining example of this emergent style of language, it’s to be found not in
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the language of the corporate world (even though corporations like United freely
make use of it to their benefit), but in the tortured and reprehensible term “officerinvolved shooting.” The term has crept into the lexicon only recently (around
1989, according to Google’s ngram viewer), and quickly became a hallmark of
American policing. It exists for one reason only: to obfuscate the circumstances
surrounding police killings of civilians, whether justified or not, and to efface any
agency among law enforcement for the use of deadly force.
The term “officer-involved shooting” is a perfect example of bureaucratic speech:
It invariably is paired with an active verb (“an officer-involved shooting occurred”)
and yet the entire purpose of the construction is to imbue the scene with passivity.
Police did not kill anyone; a shooting just occurred and it happened to involve
officers. There is no actor in an officer-involved shooting, and not even any real
actions. We don’t even technically know who was shot, only that an officer was
somehow involved. An entire syntactical arrangement consisting of a subject
(“police”), a verb (“shot”), and an object (“a civilian”) are transmuted into a noun
(“shooting”) with a compound adjective (“officer-involved”) attached. It’s almost as
if nothing took place at all.
Not only is it venal, you can tell a great deal simply by the syntax of sentences in
which it’s employed: “Police chased the suspect into an alleyway; once cornered,
the suspect appeared to draw a weapon, and at that point an officer-involved
shooting took place.” Agency is granted to both the police and the victim through a
series of dynamic verbs, creating a sense of action and suspense, right up until the
moment of the shooting, when all agency mysteriously vanishes. The awkwardness
of the syntactical construction, the strange wrenching of the sentence from the
active voice to this bizarre passivity—all these are hallmarks of the bureaucratic
voice, in that it will go to such lengths to avoid culpability that it will distort and
pervert language itself.
***
We tend to think of the purpose of style guides as helping students to write clearer
and more effectively. But increasingly, the far more important side of composition
pedagogy is teaching students how to read. And teaching students how to spot and
decipher the bureaucratic voice must become an essential skill.
Readers need to know, for example, that journalists who use phrases like “officerinvolved shooting” in any context other than a direct quote from law enforcement
are derelict. It is law enforcement’s prerogative to use spin and dissimulation to
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obtain favorable coverage; it is the media’s role to resist this. And yet, this is a role
the media has almost wholeheartedly abdicated.
The bureaucratic state never acts of its own volition; it is
always reactionary, and it always acts because the victim
leaves it no choice.”
On Monday night, after a police officer killed a man in a Houston suburb, local
station ABC 13 reported “Man Shot Dead in Officer-Involved Shooting in
Northwest Houston.” Another station, CW39, more accurately reported the event
with the headline, “HPD: Officer Kills Man After Responding to Noise Complaint
in Acres Home,” though the first line of the story defaults back to police PR: “An
officer-involved shooting has led to the death of an allegedly armed man in
Northwest Houston.” The night before, police killed another man in Fremont,
California. The ABC affiliate reported “1 Dead After Officer-Involved Shooting in
Fremont, Cause Under Investigation,” the Fox affiliate headlined their story “One
Dead in Fremont Officer Involved Shooting,” and the East Bay Times uncritically
repeated the term in two separate pieces.
Compare this to the local NBC affiliate, KNTV, who reported the incident as:
“Man Shot Dead by Fremont Police After Firing at Officers,” and only used the
term “officer involved shooting” in quoting or paraphrasing law enforcement. In
addition to not doing law enforcement’s PR work for free, the NBC story’s
headline is clearer conveys more pertinent information, and is far more impactful.
(In the ABC and Fox headlines, it’s even clear if the person killed was a cop or
civilian.) Clarity such as this is often a dead giveaway as to the merits of the
writing. Readers need to be trained to understand that, when it comes to
bureaucratic sources, ugliness in prose is usually not entirely aesthetic, but usually
is covering up something far more egregious than style.
The fact that I was able to find numerous examples of this egregious failure in the
past few days alone indicates the degree to which American journalism is
compromised by bureaucratic style. If the supposedly objective journalists we rely
on to report facts are so hopelessly smitten by the language of violence, what hope
do the rest of us have?
After all, the purpose of the bureaucratic voice is less to shape our thoughts or how
we see the external world, but to reward incuriosity. The citizen who reads of an
“officer-involved shooting” is invited to not think too hard about things and fill in
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whatever preconceived notions they may already hold about law enforcement, the
use of violence, and the prevalence of criminality among racial minorities or those
with mental health issues. United’s use of language in its email to employees does
not itself shape our perception; rather it offers soothing pabulum to those whose
minds are already made up, or who are predisposed to support bureaucracy and its
use of force. Watching the cell phone videos of the assault has, for most people, the
immediate effect of provoking outrage and awakening a desire for justice. The
purpose of bureaucratic speech is to dull these responses. It suggests your outrage
is not worth it, that it’s fine to go back to what you were doing, that it’s best to
move along and mind your own business.
After all, bureaucracy whispers in your ear, the guy probably had it coming.
***
Colin Dickey is the author of Ghostland: An American History in Haunted
Places, along with two other books of nonfiction. He is also the co-editor of The Morbid
Anatomy Anthology.
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Nobody Mean More to Me than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan
Jordan, June
Harvard Educational Review; Aug 1988; 58, 3; Research Library
pg. 363
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Hanley Cardozo
Reading Reflections Guidelines
To use writing as a tool for learning and critical thinking about the class readings, you will
compose twice-weekly informal, exploratory minimum 250-word reading responses. These
should respond to the prompt posted on Canvas, and begin with a quote from the text (or texts) to
which you are referring. (The quote does not count toward your word count.) In your responses,
don’t worry too much about grammatical correctness or organization. These are exploratory
responses that are meant for you to think critically and closely about the readings and make
connections between them and your own experiences as a reader and writer. Submit your
response by 9:00 PM the night before class.
The purpose of the Reading Reflections is to practice thinking and writing about our assigned
readings, as well as to prep for class discussion.
Reading Reflections will be graded on a scale of 5 points, with 4 points given for a completed,
on-topic post that is turned in on time, and 5 for an especially thoughtful reflection that looks
closely at the text. They will lose one point for each day that they are late.
Example:
Quote: “Do we see the same thing? We'd have to get together and compare notes to make
absolutely sure, but I think we do. There will be necessary variations, of course: some receivers
will see a cloth which is turkey red, some will see one that's scarlet, while others may see still
other shades. (To colorblind receivers, the red tablecloth is the dark gray of cigar ashes.) Some
may see scalloped edges, some may see straight ones. Decorative souls may add a little lace, and
welcome: my tablecloth is your tablecloth, knock yourself out.”
When I was reading Stephen King’s claim that writing is telepathy, I initially felt confused. How
could he claim that writing was communication without the known senses? You have to use your
senses to read. However, when I got to the paragraph I quoted above, I understood what he was
saying: that although we read writing with our senses, it is also an act that communicates a
thought from one mind to another, without using speech, over a span of time. His point, when he
asks us to picture a rabbit in a cage with a red tablecloth and a blue number eight on its back, is
that he can have a specific image in his mind in 1997 and send that image to someone in the
future, perhaps even after his death, and they will be able to picture the same thing, and he’s
doing it through writing. Even if some details change, the basic image will survive. At first, when
the implications of that really hit me, I was excited. I like the idea that my words now could be
read by someone in the future, that we could be having a conversation even though we are
separated by time and space. At the same time, that made me feel pretty nervous as well. I write
a lot of ridiculous things, and something about the telepathy framing made me feel more selfconscious! Thinking about my own writing as telepathy will probably change how I write. I will
be thinking more about my audience – not just my present audience, but a potential future
audience as well. I don’t think I’ll write fewer ridiculous things, but I will try to take my writing
seriously.
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