A style guide for spies misses its grammatical target

Now that the war on terror is cooling down, the war on grammar is hotting up.

Last week, a 185-page style guide written by the CIA to help its agents write a respectable sentence was circulated online, proving that the agency takes the protection of the Oxford comma almost as seriously as protection of the US. If you want to write like a spy you must never split an infinitive unless you have a jolly good excuse, must know the difference between "oral" and "verbal", and must only use "hopefully" to mean "with hope".

This news will make pedants the world over feel very safe indeed. In an age in which people no longer fear reds under beds and mainly don't expect to be blown up in the course of a normal day, one of the few things that still terrifies them is misuse of grammar.

Last Wednesday, I overheard colleagues discussing the most bruising football match in World Cup history and one said: "Did you hear the commentator said 'disinterested', when he meant 'uninterested'?"

I turned from that conversation to see on Twitter people criticising the pop star Ariana Grande for her lyric "I got one less problem without ya", when she should have sung one fewer.

Equally, by far the most controversial column I've written recently enraged readers not because I suggested the average male ego could not cope with having a higher earning wife, but because the title read "Divorce is a risk when she earns more than him". Angry emails poured in claiming it should have been "than he does".

The reason we get so excited about grammar is because it is one of the few means left of establishing our social superiority.

I was the victim of a groovy education in the 1960s and 1970s, and grew up not knowing a preposition from a proposition, yet because my mother once warned me against the dangling participle, I am a life-long, sworn enemy of it. Every time I catch one I feel a powerful mixture of outrage and condescension, and so am delighted to see that the CIA takes just as dim a view of this weapon of misconstruction as I do.

Yet in every other way The Style Manual & Writers Guide for Intelligence Publications is a misguided, worrying document. The very title is a giveaway that the contents are going to be a dud: it is so long that I was bored before I'd even got to the end of it and, worse, contains a grammatical howler. The guide belongs to the writer. And so there should be an apostrophe in there somewhere.

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Inside, the attention to detail is as impressive as it is pointless. There is a 13-page discussion on the use of capital letters, in which it is revealed that I really should have used a big A for Agency in paragraph two above. There is also a detailed section on how to refer to a range of numbers in which it decrees: "The march covered 10 to 15 kilometres (not 10-15 kilometres)".

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After 150 pages of rules, the agency/Agency offers some tips, or "helpful precepts" as it calls them, on how to write well. "Favour the active voice and shun streams of polysyllables and prepositional phrases," it urges. George Orwell ("never use a long word where a short one will do" etc) would not have been impressed.

The point about language is that it changes, though seems to be doing so slowly at the CIA. This version of the guide, updated in 2011, feels the need to explains that "email" is "a way to transmit messages electronically, or a message or messages so transmitted".

It also says that the Third World "refers to the economically under-developed or developing nations in Africa, Asia and Latin America", pointing out that some countries in it are more developed than others. It does not mention that no one uses the term any more as it is borderline derogatory, or that if you do not know that wealth is distributed unevenly between countries, a career as a spy is probably not for you.

Yet the most alarming entry of all is against the word "war". All the style guide has to say on this large and important subject is "see footnote 7 for guidance on capitalisation".

From this footnote I deduce that the war on grammar should be lower case. I also deduce that it isn't the right war to be fighting. A few minor grammatical mistakes between spies surely do not much matter so long as they are in prose that is accurate, lucid and as short as possible. The war the CIA ought to be waging is against jargon, euphemism and hyperbole.

In the foreword to the guide, Fran Moore, the agency's Director for Intelligence, says it "reflects an enduring commitment to the highest standards of care and precision . . . "

This windy waffle leaves the reader feeling tired and a little depressed. What she meant was: "Our reports must be clear. Here is how to make them so." Even the pronoun in her title suggests all is not well: the agency has dumped the more accurate "of" in favour of a euphemistic "for", with its bogus implication that the holder of the title will not be lording it over anyone else.

When it comes to style guides for bureaucrats, the British Home Office showed how to do it better last year when it banned 50 of the most widespread and pernicious jargon words.

It ruled that there should be no more driving without a steering-wheel, no delivering without a pizza and no key without a lock. And most important of all, there should be no going forward unless giving directions.

Why these phrases matter is that they slip off the tongue and the keyboard with no intervention from the brain. By outlawing them it was forcing its workers to adopt the only rule of good writing that matters: think about what you want to say first, then write it down.

lucy.kellaway@ft.com

Twitter: @lucykellaway

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