22.06.15
Grammar and pedantic ministers
For the second government running, the title of most pedantic minister goes to… Michael Gove!
As education secretary he set out his “10 golden rules” for writing and grammar, including such advice as: “If in doubt, cut it out”; “In letters, adjectives add little, adverbs even less”; and “Read the great writers to improve your own prose – George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh, Jane Austen and George Eliot, Matthew Parris and Christopher Hitchens.”
Now the Independent is reporting that the new lord chancellor is patronising another government ministry. In an apparent update of his previous rules, he has posted a page on the MoJ intranet entitled ‘Ministerial Correspondence Preferences’.
His new grammatical edicts include never using the world “impact” as a verb and not using contractions so that “doesn’t” becomes “does not”. He also informs civil servants that “the phrases best-placed and high-quality are joined with a dash, very few others are”.
Gove also disapproves of “unnecessary” capitalisations and the word “ensure”, which his civil servants must always replace with “make sure”.
Most amusingly he has told officials they must never start a sentence with “however”, despite doing just this in many articles he wrote for The Times as a journalist.
One would think that a Secretary of State might be able to find more productive uses of his time.
One would also like you to know that great effort was taken to ensure Gove’s grammatical rules didn’t impact the writing of this article.