Police wasting time

The police often have a hand in giving out long sentences. Now they’re writing them.

A potentially record-breaking 102-word single sentence appears in the Association of Chief Police Officers’ comeback to a government report on policing. Here’s the offending passage (note – do not attempt to read this before operating heavy machinery):

“The promise of reform which the Green Paper heralds holds much for the public and Service alike; local policing, customized to local need with authentic answerability, strengthened accountabilities at force level through reforms to police authorities and HMIC, performance management at the service of localities with targets and plans tailored to local needs, the end of centrally engineered one size fits all initiatives, an intelligent approach to cutting red tape through redesign of processes and cultures, a renewed emphasis on strategic development so as to better equip our service to meet the amorphous challenges of managing cross force harms, risks and opportunities.”

If you made it to the end: well done. This kind of meandering, jargon-heavy sentence would almost certainly lose most readers a quarter of the way through: 35 words should be the maximum length in such a document.

Although a spokeswoman did hold her hands up on behalf of the police chiefs’ verbosity, she also posed the defence that the piece was written primarily to persuade civil servants. She claimed it was therefore written in ‘a language familiar to them’.

The civil servants we’ve worked with certainly deserve a lot better.

But if she’s right about ACPO’s audience, it’s little wonder that we’re all prisoners to paperwork.

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Author: Catie Holdridge

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Catie joined Emphasis with an English literature and creative writing degree and a keen interest in what makes language work. Having researched, written, commissioned and edited dozens of articles for the Emphasis blog, she now knows more about the intricacies of effective professional writing than she ever thought possible.

She produced and co-wrote our online training programme, The Complete Business Writer, and these days oversees all the Emphasis marketing efforts. And she keeps office repartee at a suitably literary level.