Passive voice and inflated jargon constitute teachable techniques for opaque writing

Evidence

Professor Gerald Grow (2012) has written brief guidelines called “How to Write ‘Official,’” which provides a set of rules on how to communicate opaque-ly and misinformatively. These rules, which specify the nine top features of good euphemistic writing, include: Put it in the passive voice and delete the agent of the actions; inflate with terminology that does not add meaning; build in noun strings; add a qualifier of uncertain relation to the original statement; add noun strings and terminology to the qualifier; separate related words; equivocate and obfuscate; cover your tracks and make yourself look good. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 373

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Provides a concrete checklist of what makes euphemistic/official language work — the passive voice trick is the load-bearing mechanism.
• FICTION: A satirical or dystopian scene could feature a bureaucracy whose entire rulebook for official communication is essentially Grow’s list.

Related

• Passive voice and jargon are teachable techniques for hiding agency (similarity 0.89)