The Party Manifesto Awards for (Mostly) Making A Pig’s Ear Of Written Communication
Struggling to decide which party to vote for on 8th June? Then consider assessing them on their lack of writing ability rather than their actual policies. (Obviously don’t do this really.) I’ve read the three main manifestos so you don’t have to, and now it’s time to present the trophies.
Let the awards begin…
The Deep-Sea Diver Award for Longest Sentence
Winner: Labour
Have an oxygen tank at the ready, then try saying this beauty out loud:
Aaaand breathe.
This Tory sentence is actually one word longer, but the commas make it a bit more manageable:
The Queen Gertrude Award for Protesting Too Much
Winner: Conservatives
The “Michael Gove Is Gonna Be Maaaaaad” Award for… Probably Making Michael Gove Mad
Winner: Conservatives
You’ll remember* that a couple of years ago, Michael Gove MP was in the news for issuing guidance to his civil servants on grammar rules and his own pet peeves when it comes to departmental correspondence.
One of the rules was: don’t start a sentence with the word “however”. (He says it should go after a verb instead — e.g. “There are, however, many options.”)
Well, Theresa May’s lot are clearly showing him who’s boss these days:
*Of course you won’t. Only a crazy person would remember something like this.
The Royal Mail Award for Postal Achievement Of The Year
Winner: Labour
These parties do love to “deliver” things — especially Labour: 48 of 23,553 words (0.2%) are “deliver”, “delivers”, “delivered” or “delivering”.
OK, so 0.2% isn’t that much, but compared to the Tories (45 out of 29,877 words; 0.15%), the Lib Dems (25 out of 21,054 words; 0.12%), or normal people in everyday life (I admittedly have no clue how to measure this one), I consider it noteworthy.
Especially when it’s used in clunktastic ways like this:
The “Are You Normally Just Pretending To Be Wooden And Old-Fashioned, Or Did You Let Your Neighbour Loose On The Manifesto?” Award for Surprise Colloquialism
Winner: Labour
While the Lib Dem manifesto is refreshingly easy to read, the same can’t be said of the other two: they seem to be trying to convey authority with long, meandering sentences, big words and refusal to use contractions (“doesn’t”, “won’t”, etc.).
So when “normal” words appear out of the blue, it’s all a bit of a surprise.
Did they do it on purpose — to shock us out of our half-reading, half-wondering-why-we’re-not-outside-enjoying-the-sun daze? Or did they momentarily forget to check the thesaurus for something more serious?
The “We Understand How Semi-Colons Work, So We’re Going To Damn Well Use Them” Award for Paying Attention In School
Winner: Conservatives
While the Tories’ abundant use of semi-colons seems like overkill, it’s hard to hold against them the fact that they’ve nailed it — both in lists and to separate out two parts of a sentence.
In total, the Conservatives have 35 semi-colons in their manifesto. The Lib Dems have nine, while Labour manages just one — and it should have been a colon.
The Tesco Award for Nailing The Whole “Less vs Fewer” Thing
Winner: Conservatives
(Genuine appreciation for a change.) Many would have buckled under the pressure, but the Tories nailed this sentence:
The “Competition? What Competition?” Award for Enviable Self-Confidence
Winner: Conservatives
Let’s review the tally:
- Conservative mentions of Labour (0), Liberal Democrat (0) and Coalition (0) = 0
- Labour mentions of Tory/ies (18), Conservative (68), Liberal Democrat (0) and Coalition (0) = 83
- Liberal Democrat mentions of Tory/ies (2), Conservative (32) and Labour (6) = 42
The “You Really Should Have Trademarked That” Award for Slogan-Stealing
Winner: Conservatives
And in prime position, too. Double burn!
The Maria von Trapp Award for Repurposing Material
(I can’t tell you how proud I am of this award name.)
Winner: Conservatives
Their manifesto screams “lots of this will end up in a speech one day”. If you read it out loud and compare it to either of the other two manifestos (especially Labour’s, which can only ever be repurposed as a GCSE exam exercise on “spot the errors”), you’ll see what I mean.
It’s easy to imagine this excerpt being read out by Theresa May one day, with loud cheers and yells of approval from party supporters:
The “Punctuation Nazis Are Giving You Death Stares Right Now” Award for Screwing Around With Hyphens
Joint winners: Labour and Conservatives
Let’s talk compound adjectives. (Stick with me: this is thrilling.)
When I first wrote this post, I went into lots of detail explaining what compound adjectives are, when they should be used, why they’re useful, etc., but I ended up putting myself to sleep.
So instead I’ll just focus on the ire-raising inconsistency of Labour and the Tories on the matter — each of them taking an exasperating”What do we feel like today — hyphen or no hyphen?” approach to the whole shebang.
The top row of each column (from the Labour manifesto) is correct, but I’m pretty sure that was just a fluke:
The Conservatives are no better: they have stuff like “long term challenges”, “higher level skills training”, “highly-skilled jobs” and “strategically-important sectors” (all of which are wrong). You’ll just have to trust me on this because creating the ugly grid above used up all my design-related energy for the day.
You know who nailed it every single time? The Lib Dems. For example, this is pretty much the black belt of hyphen usage in compound adjectives:
The “It’s A Simple Find-And-Replace Exercise So How Did You Manage To Balls This One Up?” Award for “Spelling Out Numbers vs Not”
Winner: Conservatives
We have: “thirty years”, “one per cent”, “2 per cent”, “three per cent”, “33 per cent”, “60 per cent”, “eighty per cent”, “1 million”, “ten million”, “forty”, and “600”, among others.
There might be method in this madness, but I’ve struggled to find it.
The “Perhaps Give Up On Government And Become An English Teacher” Award for An Almost Perfect (In SPaG Terms) Manifesto
Winner: Liberal Democrats
The sentences flow well, the messaging is concise and persuasive, the grammar and punctuation are pretty much spot on, and they’re consistent (e.g. with words vs digits). While it doesn’t have quite the “rousing speech”-ness of the Conservative one, it’s pretty hard to fault.
The “Oh S**t, We Double-Booked The Brewery P**s-Up” Award for Complete And Utter Grammatical Incompetence
Winner: Labour
Put it this way: if we were to elect a party based on its manifesto writers’ grasp of grammar, punctuation, spelling, conciseness and consistency, the Labour Party wouldn’t have a hope in hell of getting in.
In addition to everything mentioned above, we have…
1) The dreaded comma splice
If you know me, you’ll know that I hate comma splices more than I hate pineapple. (And I hate pineapple A LOT.)
A comma splice is lazy: it happens when a writer can’t figure out how to connect two entirely separate parts of the sentence (which could easily be two sentences in their own right), so just inserts a comma there and hopes for the best.
Here’s an example of a sentence that contains a comma splice: “Thank you for the guidance, it is very helpful.”
And here’s another one — straight from the Labour Party manifesto:
2) Typos / proofreading errors
Like this:
And this:
3) Adding “ing” into the mix
(Is there a word for this error? Please let me know!)
They did this a lot, the Labour Party — although to be fair, the Tories did it a couple of times too. Basically, it should be: “We will set up a national review of local pubs to examine the causes for their large-scale demise, as well as establish [NO “ing”] a joint taskforce…” (It should also probably be “OF their local demise” rather than “FOR”.)
Aaaand finally…
The “Not Quite ‘We The People’, Is It?” Award for Lamest Preamble
Winner: Labour
I do worry about how much brain power goes into writing the introductions to each policy area rather than the policies themselves…
This one from Labour takes the biscuit:
