Mock 2 — Reading and Use of English

The apology that isn't one

Few habits of British speech are more thoroughly 1 ______ than the apology. The word is produced when a stranger treads on your foot, when a colleague interrupts you, and when you yourself are the one arriving late; it has 2 ______ ceased to carry any admission of fault at all.

Visitors take it 3 ______ face value, understandably, and conclude that the British are a nation racked by guilt. Linguists take a rather different 4 ______. What is being performed, they argue, is not contrition but repair: the word acknowledges that the smooth surface of a shared moment has been disturbed, and it 5 ______ no difference at all which party did the disturbing.

This is why an insistence on establishing who was actually to 6 ______ strikes British ears as faintly aggressive. The apology was never a claim about responsibility; it was an offer to 7 ______ over an awkwardness and move on. Those who decline the offer are not being more honest, merely tone-deaf — though nobody, needless to 8 ______, will ever tell them so.

An hour a week in a room

For all the buildings and the ceremony, what Oxford actually sells is an hour a week in a room with somebody who has read your essay. The tutorial has changed remarkably little since the 1870s, and it survives 9 ______ spite of, rather than because of, any evidence that it is an efficient way to teach.

Two students — sometimes only one — read their work aloud and are then argued 10 ______ of it. 11 ______ matters is not whether the essay was right, because most weeks it was not, but whether its author can defend, revise or abandon a position while being watched. Few 12 ______ the graduates who describe the hour as formative can remember what they wrote about.

What they remember is the moment 13 ______ which a tutor observed, quite mildly, that they had not answered the question. There is nowhere to hide in a room containing two people, 14 ______ is there any point in producing more words: length, at Oxford, is read as evidence of confusion.

The system's defenders rarely claim that it is efficient, and they never claim that it is fair. What they 15 ______ claim is that it is the only arrangement in which a student is obliged to think aloud in front of an expert every single week — a habit 16 ______ no lecture hall has ever managed to instil.

The art of the museum label

The forty or so words printed beside an object are among the most widely read prose in Britain, and their authors are almost entirely 17 ______. (KNOW) Writing them is a craft with rules of a 18 ______ severity. (SURPRISE)

A label has to identify the object, place it in time, and say why anybody should care — all within the number of seconds a visitor is 19 ______ to stand still, which the research puts at about eleven. (WILL) The 20 ______, naturally, is to write more. (TEMPT)

Curators know a great deal, and the 21 ______ of that knowledge presses against the word count on every card in the room. (ACCUMULATE) But the 22 ______ label in a gallery is not the most informative one; it is simply the one that goes unread. (LONG)

The best writers therefore treat 23 ______ as a courtesy rather than a constraint, (BRIEF) and they manage it so 24 ______ that the visitor comes away believing the object explained itself. (VISIBLE)

The plain style and its discontents

I have spent twenty years being paid to make other people's sentences shorter, and I have begun to suspect that I have been doing harm.

The plain-English movement began, in the 1970s, as an act of justice. Forms that nobody could read were keeping people from money they were owed; contracts that ran to nine hundred words a clause were not accidentally opaque. Against that, the case for short words and active verbs was unanswerable, and the campaigners who made it have earned their statues.

What has happened since is that a tool for a particular job has been promoted to a philosophy. The rule that a sentence should carry one idea is excellent advice for a benefits form and poor advice for an argument, because an argument is precisely the place where two ideas have to be held in a single grip: this, although that; this, and therefore that. Subordination is not decoration. It is the visible wiring of a thought, and a writer who strips it out has not made the thought simpler, merely hidden the fact that it was complicated.

I notice the effect most in the work of very able students. They arrive able to produce a page of clean, short, declarative sentences, every one of which is true, and which together say nothing in particular. Ask them why the third sentence follows the second and they cannot tell you, because nothing in the prose was ever asked to say. The connectives that would have carried the reasoning were taken out in the name of readability, and the reasoning went with them.

An editor I once worked with used to demonstrate this with a single line from a government leaflet. We may reduce your payment if your circumstances change had been rewritten, admirably, from something three times its length. It was clear. It was also, she pointed out, silent on every question a reader in trouble would actually have: which circumstances, by how much, and who decides. The plain version had not answered fewer questions than the original. It had simply stopped raising them.

There is a further cost, less often admitted. Plainness has acquired a moral flavour. To write plainly is now to be honest, democratic, on the side of the reader; to write in long sentences is to be evasive, elitist, up to something. This is a marvellous piece of luck for anybody who wants to seem trustworthy without being clear, and the political speech of the last decade has taken full advantage of it. A short sentence can lie as comfortably as a long one, and it lies faster.

None of which is an argument for the return of the nine-hundred-word clause. It is an argument for a distinction the movement never drew: between prose that is hard because the writer was careless, and prose that is hard because the subject is. The first is a fault and should be edited out. The second is a fact, and editing it out is not a service to the reader but a small deception practised on him.

I would settle, these days, for a modest revision of the rule I have spent a career applying. Not make it as simple as possible — the instruction that ends, in practice, with everything pitched at the same easy level — but the older and more demanding version: as simple as the subject allows, and no simpler. The difference between those two sentences is the whole of my case, and it took me twenty years to hear it.

Four writers on the admissions interview

A · An admissions tutor
The interview survives at a handful of British universities because it does something a transcript cannot: it puts a proposition to a candidate and watches what they do with it. I am not looking for the right answer — there usually is not one — but for whether a mind moves when it is pushed. Grades tell me what somebody has already done; twenty minutes tells me something about what they might do next. The standard objection is coaching, and it is a real one: an applicant drilled by a school that runs mock interviews arrives visibly more comfortable. But comfort is not thought, and an interviewer trained to notice the difference is not taken in by it. That training is where the effort belongs. Abolishing the interview because some interviewers conduct it badly is a strange remedy — rather like closing the laboratories because some experiments are poorly designed.

B · An education researcher
Every few years somebody produces evidence that the admissions interview adds almost nothing to what examination results already predict, and every few years the universities that use it explain that their case rests on something the studies cannot capture. At some point that becomes unfalsifiable. The claim that a conversation reveals a quality of mind invisible in written work is a romantic one, and thirty years of follow-up have failed to find it. What the interview reliably measures is confidence in a room, which tracks the school a candidate attended and very little else. Nor is this something better training will repair: the advantage is produced not by prejudiced interviewers but by the format itself, which rewards a fluency that money buys. If the process cannot survive the evidence, it should not survive at all.

C · A former tutor, now writing on admissions
I have no quarrel with the claim that a conversation shows you something a script does not; I have sat through enough of them to know it is true. My quarrel is with the remedy. Interviewers at my own university have been trained, retrained and monitored for the better part of thirty years, and the profile of who does well has not shifted in any way that survives measurement. The problem is not what the interviewer notices. It is that an open-ended conversation is a format the coached candidate can prepare for and the uncoached one cannot. The answer is therefore neither to defend the interview nor simply to abolish it, but to replace it: set every applicant the same short unseen task on the day and assess the thinking rather than the performance. What we cannot do is carry on with the conversation as it stands.

D · A university lecturer
I do not doubt that a conversation shows you things an essay does not; that is not what the argument should be about. The whole debate is conducted as though the interview were a measuring instrument, which is why it never ends. Ask instead what it does for the applicant. A candidate who spends half an hour being taught — and a good interview is a small tutorial — leaves knowing what three years of this will actually feel like, and a proportion of them sensibly withdraw. No prospectus can do that. Whether the exercise also predicts a degree class seems to me a question of secondary interest, and both sides treat the statistics as settling something they cannot settle. On coaching I am with the researchers: no amount of interviewer training will neutralise it, and anyone who says otherwise has not looked. But that is an argument for being honest about what the interview is for, not for removing the one occasion on which a student discovers what they are signing up for.

The last local newspaper

The Bury Free Press has appeared every week since 1855. In 2019 it lost the last reporter who lived in the town, and its coverage of Bury St Edmunds is now assembled forty miles away from press releases and the council's own website. What has gone is easy to call news and much harder to describe accurately.

41 ______

That is the part of the job nobody misses until it has stopped, because nobody reads it while it is being done. Court lists, planning applications, the licensing committee, the minutes of the school governors: unglamorous, largely unread, and the only continuous written account a place has ever had of itself.

42 ______

The obvious reply is that the internet has replaced all of this, and in one sense it plainly has. A town of forty thousand people now has three Facebook groups, a WhatsApp channel for the school run and a resident who films the council meetings on his phone. In raw quantity there is far more local information in circulation than there was in 1990.

43 ______

It is also, and this is the difficulty, almost entirely unsearchable. A post is written for whoever happens to be looking that week. It is not indexed, not archived, not corrected, and in five years it will be unreachable in practice. The newspaper was a poor medium in a dozen ways, but it had one property the new arrangement lacks: somebody put it in a box.

44 ______

Historians noticed this before anybody else did. The standard source for the social history of a British town between 1880 and 1990 is its local paper; for the period since, there is no equivalent. Whether anybody will want to write the history of Bury St Edmunds in 2070 is beside the point. The point is that the option has quietly closed.

45 ______

None of which tells us what to do. Local journalism failed commercially, and it failed for reasons — the loss of classified advertising, mostly — that had nothing whatever to do with how much anybody valued it. Grants and trusts have kept a handful of titles alive, and a few reader-owned co-operatives are now trying.

46 ______

But the case for them will have to be made on the ground that they are a public record rather than a public service, and that is a harder argument to make and a much less appealing one to fund. It is always easier to raise money for a newsroom than for an archive, even when they are the same room.

The thing that took longest

A · Marta, an architect from Kraków, in Sheffield
I could run a meeting in English within a year, and I still could not tell when one had gone badly. Vocabulary was never the difficulty. The difficulty was that nothing was ever said twice, and the second saying was the one that mattered. A colleague told me that a scheme I had spent three months on was “certainly one way of approaching it”, and I wrote the phrase in my notebook as praise. It stayed there for four years. What finally rescued me was not a lesson but a piece of paper: after every meeting I now write down, in one line, what I believe has been decided, and send it to everybody in the room. About half the time somebody corrects me. I no longer have to be able to hear the disapproval — I only need somebody to deny it in writing.

B · Idris, a doctor from Lagos, in Newcastle
People assume the accent was the obstacle, and for six months it was: Tyneside took me longer than the whole of medical English. But the thing that took years was smaller and stranger. I had been taught, at home and at school, that being clear is a form of respect. Here it kept being received as aggression. I would tell a family exactly what the scan showed, in the order in which the information mattered, and I would watch them close up in front of me. A senior nurse eventually explained that in that room people need to be given the chance to ask, and that a fact offered before it is asked for lands like a verdict. I have not become vague. I have learned to leave the door open and let people walk through it in their own time, which is slower and, I have come to think, better medicine.

C · Hana, a translator from Osaka, in London
For a long time I was congratulated on my English roughly twice a week — always warmly, always by strangers — and it took me an embarrassing while to work out why I disliked it. The compliment is sincere, and it is also a small notice: you are being heard as a visitor. Nobody says it to somebody they have already placed as being from here. The odd result was that the better my English became, the more often it happened, until a friend pointed out that I had started putting deliberate mistakes into my speech to get ahead of it. I stopped doing that. But I notice that I now say “I have lived here nineteen years” within a minute of meeting anybody, which is its own kind of defence and probably no more dignified.

D · Pablo, a chef from Santiago, in Bristol
Complaining was the skill I did not have, and I did not have it for eleven years. In my first kitchen the deliveries were short twice a week and I simply absorbed it, because the alternative — telephoning a supplier to tell him he had failed — seemed to me an act of open war. Then I watched my head chef do it. He was on the phone for ninety seconds. He never once used the word “problem”. He said it was probably his end, he said he was sure it was just one of those weeks, and by the close of the call he had a full credit and the man at the other end was apologising to him. Nothing about it was direct and nothing about it was weak. I had believed those were the only two things available, and being shown that there was a third is the single most useful thing anybody has done for me here.

E · Nour, a violinist from Beirut, in Manchester
Everybody warns you about the humour and nobody warns you about the pauses. In rehearsal the conductor would stop, look at the second violins and say nothing at all for perhaps two seconds, and for two years I did not know whether those two seconds meant “again” or “that was fine” or “we are all thinking the same thing”. Words I could look up. Silence has no dictionary. What I did in the end was ask — not the conductor, who would have been kind and useless, but the woman sitting next to me, every single time, for a whole season. She thought I was strange and she answered anyway. I would say now that learning a language inside a country is not mostly the learning of words. It is finding one person patient enough to be asked the same small question two hundred times.