Much hilarity in this weekend’s papers over the fact that DEFRA Secretary Owen Patterson – he of Climate Change Scepticism fame – has launched an offensive against the great scourge of our time – bad grammar. In particular, Patterson raged against the use of brackets (seriously) and dashes – her prefers sentences to be as simple as possible. Patterson also says that long sentences should be broken up; with semicolons, and he’s also annoyed about the use of “and” and “but”. The Telegraph reported:
A copy of the list was circulated around civil servants at the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs after he was appointed last month, much to the amusement of some officials, who dubbed him the “Minister for Semicolons”.
Mr Paterson is also understood to have disseminated his guide, entitled “Punctuation Rules,” while in his last post as Northern Ireland Secretary…the minister’s is particularly irked by the use of the “Oxford comma,” with which users break the golden rule of omitting a comma at the end of a list of words, in order to avoid misunderstanding.
He wrote: “You should not accompany ‘and’ or ‘but’ with a comma.” Both words should only be used once per sentence, Mr Paterson added.
Other commands applied to brackets – to be avoided at all times – and dashes, the use of which are to be limited.
“A general rule of thumb is ‘the simpler, the better,'” the document adds. “All sentences should be as short as possible,” and the use of jargon is to be avoided.”
If you’re about to note that this post breaks many of Patterson’s rules…it’s on purpose – don’t worry. And of course Labour doesn’t have much to crow about here – we all remember the Liam Byrne memos. No, not the economy one – the soup and cappuccino one…
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