What is a Précis?

A précis is a single spaced one page paper with 1″ margins and 12 pt Times New Roman
font. The first half of the précis should be a summary of “The New Statesman Essay - The
Tyranny of Nicespeak” delivered by Deborah Cameron. It should communicate the general or
main idea tersely without quotes from the article.
A draft summary is written in class.

The second half of the paper is an analysis done at home. In this section, you should
respond to the ideas of Deborah Cameron with your own opinions. Support your opinion
with good and strong reasons. What do you think of the ideas and arguments that the
author presents? Are they strong or weak, good or fallacious? This written project should
be completed at home and submitted on Monday 02.09.2009.

You are not expected to agree or disagree with everything you read in this article; but
you are expected to support your views and rigorously evaluate your position.

The audio file and the article arelinked to “The Lectures” page on Blackboard.

http://www.newstatesman.com/200111050017

The New Statesman Essay - The Tyranny of

Nicespeak
Deborah Cameron
Deborah Cameron is professor of languages at the Institute of Education, University of London, and the
author of Good to Talk: living and working in a communication culture (Sage, £16.99)
Published 05 November 2001

Today, even academics are told how to answer the phone, and every hospital has a "mission
statement".
Deborah Cameron on the murder of public English.
In 1990 I returned to Britain after two years abroad, and found that I no longer spoke the language. My
difficulty was not with ordinary conversation, but with public discourse. The rules had changed, and I could
not get the hang of them. I was baffled when a worker at a fast-food outlet handed me a solitary carton of
milk with a cheery: "Enjoy your meal!" I was unsure how to respond when bank tellers or supermarket
checkout staff addressed me by name, as though I were an intimate friend. I pored uncomprehendingly over
the "charters" that came through my letterbox, pledging the council, the Inland Revenue and the local GP
surgery to the highest standards of "customer care". It was the same at work. My academic colleagues had
adopted new ways of using English, and while I understood the words themselves, I had no idea what real-
world entities they referred to. What, for instance, was the mysterious "quality" that we discussed at every
meeting? What did people mean when they spoke earnestly about "aims and objectives" and "learning
outcomes"? I was equally puzzled when I read the "mission statement" a committee had put together the
previous year. This struck me as a long and convoluted statement of the obvious: we educated
undergraduates, and we strove to do this well. Why was that a "mission", and who needed to have it spelt
out?
Then there were the instructions on how to answer the phone: "X Institute of Higher Education, Deborah
Cameron speaking." At least we were not required to append chirpily: "How may I help you?'' But it seemed
strange that instructions had been issued at all, and stranger still that they were generally obeyed. Only a
few years before, administrators who took it upon themselves to prescribe a standard phone salutation to
academics would have been derided as ignorant petty tyrants.
The changes I was so conscious of had actually begun some time before I went away. I had dismissed them
as passing fads. I returned, however, to what had become a revolution in public language. The likes of my
colleagues no longer thought of this new tongue as an alien one, into which they translated thoughts
originally composed in a more familiar idiom. They had become native speakers. Today, this language
pervades both the public and private sectors, and much of the working population is fluent in it. We may joke
(as Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert cartoons, does) about the cliched absurdity of mission statements
and standardised phone greetings, but we find it hard to remember a time when these were not cliches -
when we reacted to them with genuine incomprehension, and sometimes with genuine outrage.
Cultural critics had little to say about the revolution. Many were caught up in a far noisier debate, as
advocates or opponents of "political correctness". Arguments raged about the linguistic practices of a radical
fringe; Orwell's Newspeak was invoked to portray feminist councillors and anti-racist teachers as the new
thought police. Meanwhile, with far less fanfare (and almost no sustained critical analysis), mainstream
public English suffered a corporate takeover.
I use the phrase "corporate takeover" because the new public language was shaped by ideas and practices
that originated in the business world. The "mission statement" - and its shorter, pithier relative the "vision
statement" - was popularised by management gurus such as Tom Peters, who noted that successful or
"excellent" companies had a clear definition of their core goals and values, which they communicated
explicitly to every employee. Most such statements do not refer explicitly to the real core goal of any
capitalist enterprise: "Our mission is to make the largest possible profit for our shareholders." Nor, on the
whole, do they allude directly to whatever it is that the company actually does. The journalist Dorothy Grace-
Elder once reported on a visit to a Glasgow sanitary-ware factory, during which the workers were asked if
they knew the company's mission; after a moment of puzzled silence, one finally replied: "Wur mission's tae
make lavvies." Old-style manufacturing industries did not need mission statements. The mission statement
belongs to an era in which the main purpose of many companies is not making but branding things; the
language in which a company represents itself to the world is part of its brand-image.
As part of the marketising process that began during the Thatcher era and has continued to the present day,
British public sector institutions were also encouraged to view themselves as brands, and to use language
similarly, for purposes of self-promotion rather than public information. Nobody needs to be told what
universities, schools and hospitals do, but they all have mission and vision statements now, most of them
comprising platitudes such as "serving the community" and "pursuing excellence". These slogans are as
meaningless as the old mottos on schoolchildren's blazers: "Pietas" or "Manners Makyth Man". That they
are written in modern English only emphasises their vacuity: as a friend of mine observed when asked to
speak at a conference on "pursuing excellence in facilities management": "Who the hell would pursue
second-rateness?"
The branding of language does not stop with the mission statement. One of the things I found most
disconcerting on my return home was the proliferation of formulaic and scripted exchanges in the service
industries - the standard phone salutations delivered with standard perky intonation; the replacement of
traditional British courtesies by Americanisms such as "How may I help you?"; the exhortations to "Enjoy
your meal" (uttered whether or not they made sense in a given context). This way of speaking did not evolve
naturally; it reflected the corporation's growing desire to regulate and control the language that its
representatives used. The idea was to subordinate the personality of the individual speaker to a centrally
designed corporate voice. Only if everyone in an organisation said the same thing in the same way could
customers receive what one company's how-to-answer-the-phone manual called "a consistent experience of
the brand".
An extreme instance made news earlier this year: a call-centre in Bangalore, serving US customers,
required its employees to conceal their "offshore" location by impersonating Americans. Operators not only
perfected their Midwestern accents; they invented American names, and personal histories to go with them,
and watched episodes of Friends to keep their colloquialisms current. But you don't have to go to India to
find workers adopting prescribed forms of language at odds both with their ordinary ways of speaking and
with what they think of as their "real" identities or personalities. All over Britain, in call-centres and
supermarkets, airlines and insurance companies, workers are being instructed in every nuance of verbal
performance: what words to say, where to pause, what emotions to project using pitch, stress and tone. In
call-centres, hi-tech surveillance makes it possible to enforce these demands consistently. In supermarkets,
employees know that the customer they fail to greet with the prescribed open gaze and ready smile could be
a "mystery shopper" employed by the company to make spot checks on their customer service skills.
The commonest instruction given to service workers is: "Smile when you say that." Let customers know what
a great company you work for, and how happy you are to be serving them on its behalf. For public sector
professionals, the pressure takes a different form. Despite the telephone answering instructions I quoted,
professionals do not usually have to perform someone else's script. Instead, they have to produce their own
propaganda, using a language imposed from above by the government agencies that allocate their funds.
This was what was going on in the discussions of "quality" that mystified me in 1990. The government, trying
to improve the accountability of publicly funded bodies, had set up agencies to measure the quality of
university teaching. What was evaluated, however, was not what happened in lecture halls, labs and
seminar rooms. Primarily, it was (and still is) a linguistic artefact: the "self-assessment document" in which
departments define their mission and evaluate the quality of the education they provide. In theory, this is an
exercise in critical self-reflection; in practice, departments are playing a zero-sum game, competing with
others for finite and inadequate resources. If they do not claim to be "excellent", they will inevitably come out
losers. That is why British academics, just like managers in corporations, have become fluent in promotional
jargon, accentuating the positive even if that means being economical with the truth.
Self-assessment documents do not say, for instance, that large classes and overdependence on casualised
teaching staff are compromising standards. Instead, they say things like: "The challenge of teaching larger
classes has been addressed through rolling programmes of staff development; standards are monitored
through robust quality assurance procedures, in the context of an institution-wide commitment to continuous
improvement." This is an invented example, but I assure you that it is not (quite) a parody. Like the political
discourse criticised by Orwell in "Politics and the English Language", it takes a series of buzz-phrases ("the
challenge of X". "rolling programme", "staff development", "quality assurance", "continuous improvement")
and uses the verbal glue of vagueness and abstraction ("has been addressed", "in the context of") to stick
them together in the manner of a prefabricated hen house. The resulting sentence contains hardly any
information, but that is not its point. The point is to demonstrate to the Quality Assurance Agency that the
university speaks the approved managerialist language, which in turn signifies its commitment to the values
embodied in that language. The English literature scholar Peter Womack has likened academics writing this
sort of prose to Winston Smith in 1984, composing his features into the required "expression of quiet
optimism" as he turns to face the telescreen.
Managing language is a booming business, supporting legions of consultants whose expertise may consist
of having once read a book about transactional analysis or neurolinguistic programming. One big
corporation advertises that its employees are trained in "expanded listening": they have learnt that listening
is a "four-stage process" and that most people listen at a "25 per cent level of efficiency". (So far as I know,
no reputable psycholinguistic research supports either claim.) The New York Times recently reported that
computer help-desk workers are being trained to diagnose not the technical problem a caller wants help
with, but the caller's personality type. If the worker uses a language (pseudo-) scientifically designed for the
caller's personality, the interaction will be judged successful, whether or not the computer problem is solved.
In politics, too, there is a growing faith in the power of managed language to transform less tractable
realities. In the spring of 1999, New York police officers shot and killed an unarmed Gambian named
Amadou Diallo; they claimed to have mistaken him for a dangerous armed criminal. More than 1,000 people
were arrested in the protests that ensued. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and his police chief, Howard Safir,
responded by handing out pocket-sized cards that reminded police officers to speak politely to members of
the public: to address them as "sir" and "ma'am", and say "good morning", "please" and "thank you". Faced
with a serious political problem, Giuliani - not, as we have seen in recent weeks, a stupid or insensitive man
- resorted to the premise of corporate customer care: say the right words, speak nicely and all will be
forgiven.
Such examples suggest that we need to move beyond George Orwell's mid-20th-century analysis of what
ails our public language. Orwell's main concern was the ideologically motivated use of words to conceal the
truth; the remedy he proposed was plain English, a prose style as clear and transparent as glass. The
problem with today's public language, however, is not so much that it represents reality inaccurately or
dishonestly, but that it does not set out to be a representation of anything at all. When organisations
proclaim they are "pursuing excellence", or when they write scripts for their employees to parrot, they want
us not to believe the words, but to applaud the sentiments behind them. Their claims are not primarily
"veracity claims" ("what I am telling you is a fact"), but "sincerity claims" ("what I am telling you comes from
the heart").
Orwell's antidote to Newspeak - plain English - was intended to expose statements of dubious veracity: he
reasoned that if we stripped away the obfuscation and understood what was being asserted, we would
expose the lies. But dubious claims of sincerity cannot be exposed in the same way. "Nicespeak" is
dishonest in a different way from Newspeak, and plain English is less effective as a critical response to it.
Indeed, Orwell's prescription has been co-opted by the other side: no one knows better than a corporate PR-
person or political spin-doctor the value of plain language for creating ersatz intimacy and simulating sincere
concern.
If fake sincerity does not respond to the bracing tonic of Orwellian plainness, perhaps we should try the
homeopathic approach: irony. This is the technique of anti-corporate "culture jammers": take our
adversaries' language and turn it against them by inflecting it with a different or opposite meaning. ("Just Do
It," the anti-sweatshop campaigners tell Nike - meaning: "Pay your workers a living wage.") Admittedly, the
ironist has a challenging task in a world where a notice can announce in all seriousness: "In order to better
serve you, we are closed this afternoon." But if our mission is to expose the emptiness behind the painted
smile of Nicespeak, irony and satire may be our most effective weapons: suitably postmodern remedies for a
postmodern linguistic disease.

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