enormous effort to understand what is meant. Such sentences are obnoxious,
and are to be avoided.
To emphasise the problem of convoluted sentence structure let us draw an
analogy. Imagine that you are making a mosaic which involves subtle details of
shape and colour. To make the mosaic all you have are tiles of different
colours, but each tile has one uniform colour. Tiles come in sheets and you
can cut the sheets into pieces of any shape that you want. Now answer this
question about the size of the tiles you make by cutting larger tiles into pieces.
To make the mosaic are you likely to use small tile pieces or large tile pieces?
Clearly, you would need smaller rather than larger tiles. Subtle details of shape
and colour cannot be captured with large tiles. Similarly, subtle and complex
ideas and relationships cannot easily be described with a lot of long sentences.
Often they do not give the flexibility of expression and the care in arranging
ideas that is needed.
219
Excessive verbiage comes in at least two forms. One is using more words or a
longer word than is necessary. Examples are “following” and “subsequent to”
instead of “after,” and “during the course of” instead of “while”.
220
The other is a form of tautology in using two or three words of essentially the
same meaning. In general a writer should avoid this, but it is worth noting that
there was good reason for some duplication of terminology after the Norman
Conquest in 1066. The invading Normans brought with them their mother
tongue of French. Already Latin was in use as the common language for
educated people in Europe. And as things settled down after the conquest,
Anglo-Saxon pressed its claim for use in official documents. One way to cater
for this was to write legal documents using words from all three languages. For
example, the common phrase commencing a will was then, and still was
centuries later: “I give, devise and bequeath [my assets etc]”. In the phrase
“give, devise and bequeath,” “give” is Anglo Saxon, “devise” is derived from
Latin and “bequeath” comes from French. Retaining this usage may serve as a
constant reminder that our nation is made of many cultures, all of whom
should be protected and served by the legal system.
In many cases, however, it is not possible to use simple words because the
concept is best described by technical words. In such cases it may help to
translate technical words or complicated concepts into simple concepts, even
if these are an approximation (in which case it is necessary to indicate as
___________________
219
Some judges are sceptical. Gibbs (1993) p 501 states that plain
English training “is not likely to improve a judge’s style”.
220
Sheller (1996) p 4
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