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Azzam To'meh

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“BAG: What do you suppose would happen to an American airline, not necessarily American Airlines, but all the airlines use officialese . . . What do you suppose would happen to that airline if you and I were hired to rewrite all their spiels in good, plain, humane English? Would that be a business drag on that company, or would it be good for them?

DFW: I think the really interesting question is why hasn’t this been done before? It would be a fascinating experiment. Here’s my guess. It would be a great marketing device. It would be a way to look different from other airlines. It would sound more human. Right? I mean, we always get these corporations: “We care about you. Therefore, we proactively try to facilitate your growing business needs.” Well, that second clause communicates the opposite of “We care about you” because that second clause isn’t a human-to-human contact.”
― David Foster Wallace, Quack This Way

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“But you overuse the passive voice, you‘re distorting the normal order of the sentences. You’re filling it up, often with prepositions or with forms of the verb to be, which is one of the ways that writing gets flabbed out. And you’re dehumanizing the writing because there’s no agent. Right?. So it immediately becomes more abstract, so the reader’s eyes glaze over quickly.”
― David Foster Wallace, Quack This Way

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“One of the things that the college drummed into me is, “Welcome to the adult world. It doesn’t care about you. You want it to? Make it. Make it care.”
― David Foster Wallace, Quack This Way

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“I believe it is better to pay attention and to try to make your language as beautiful and graceful and adroit as possible.”
― David Foster Wallace, Quack This Way

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“People, unless they’re paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority. For me, I’ve noodled about this a fair amount because a lot of this sort of language afflicts me. My guess is this: officialese, as spoken by officials, is meant to empty the communication of a certain level of humanity. On purpose. If I’m delivering a press release as an official, I’m speaking not as David Wallace. I’m speaking as the deputy assistant commissioner in charge of whatever. I’m speaking with and for some sort of bureaucratic entity. My guess is one of the reasons why we as a people tolerate, or even expect, this officialese is that we associate it with a different form of communication than interpersonal—Dave and Bryan talking together. That the people who are speaking are in many senses speaking not as human beings but as the larynx and tongue of a larger set of people, responsibilities, laws, regulations, whatever.”
― David Foster Wallace, Quack This Way

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