Overcoming malscribophobia: the campaign for plain writing

I’ve been suffering for a while now from malscribophobia. For anyone who hasn’t heard of this debilitating condition, it’s an extreme intolerance of bad writing, manifested in sudden flushes of rage at missing apostrophes, spurious capital letters, excessively long sentences and the like. 

It’s been getting worse. It began with English and has recently spread to French. And here’s the thing they don’t tell you: there’s a lot of bad writing in French.

The problem is, French is a language that appreciates “style”. Even the phrase used to describe being able to write well - “avoir une belle plume” – buckles under the weight of “style”. When style is prized over substance, or confused with cliché, the results are disastrous.

Take the guidebook to Venice I bought for this year’s holiday. Published under the brand of a well-known travel series, it should have been informative, with some choice historical anecdotes, clear recommendations, and visual and linguistic devices to help you navigate the book (and most importantly, decide what to do after the morning’s third cappucino).

Instead, what emerged from the pages was a step-by-step massacre of both Venice and the French language. You’d need to read the whole book for the complete, awful experience, but here are a few of my favourites:

1) On the complex reasons for the decline of Venitian domination of the Mediterranean, and the completely unrelated fact the city is home to Vivaldi:

“Après avoir perdu sa suprématie maritime, Venise découvrit le pouvoir de la musique”
("After losing its naval supremacy, Venice discovered the power of music")

2) On the fact that the relics of St Mark were lost at some point in history (crucially, it doesn’t bother to explain when, or whether they were ever found):

“Les voies du Seigneur furent parfois obscurcis par la poussière des travaux: on égara par deux fois les réliques du Saint”
("The way of the Lord was sometimes not easily visible through the clouds of construction dust: the Saint's relics were lost twice")

3) And finally, on the reasons why the glassmakers of Murano would choose to demonstrate their skills in public (incidentally they don’t – expect to see a handful of very overpriced shops):

“Aujourd’hui, conscients de ne pouvoir être égalés, le verriers oeuvrent au vu de tous…”
("Today, in the knowledge they cannot be rivalled, the glassmakers work in full view…")

If overstylised and meaningless sentences like these weren’t enough to bring out a severe episode of malscribophobia, the titles and icons used to guide readers through the book would tip anyone over the edge. 

Every single phrase came from the same banal list of infantilised and lazy travel-speak. So each area had “Les incontournables” and “Le meilleur du quartier” (with a little heart next to it – perhaps this was supposed to convey why the list was different from “Les incontournables?”) A separate list of things were “100% venitien” (unlike, one presumes, everything else in a guidebook about Venice?) and an extraordinary number of things were in a patronising diminutive: “une petite faim”, “un petit café”. The overall impression was of a restaurant guide for 7 year-olds.

The immediate solution was easy – throw the book in the nearest canal – but the wider problem remains. Malscribophobia doesn't actually exist – I made that bit up – but bad writing is everywhere. I’m making it my resolution for the rentrée to be even more intolerant of sentences with no meaning, uneccessary clichés, and patronising turns of phrase. The campaign for plain expression, writing that actually means something, starts here.