The Official Style is Richard Lanham’s name for the passive, nominalized, hedged prose that dominates institutional writing — government documents, academic papers, corporate communications, and legal texts [@lanham2006].
The Official Style has consistent features: passive voice, strings of prepositional phrases, actions buried in nominalizations (“the implementation of” instead of “implement”), and hedging (“it would appear that” instead of plain assertion). A sentence like “The utilization of available resources for the facilitation of program implementation was undertaken by the committee” is pure Official Style.
Lanham argued that this style persists not because writers lack skill but because institutions reward it. The Official Style performs authority and caution: passive voice avoids naming who acts, nominalizations hide agency, and hedging avoids commitment. These are useful for writers who want to avoid accountability. They are hostile to readers who need to understand what happened and who is responsible.
The Paramedic Method is Lanham’s systematic procedure for revising Official Style prose. His lard factor metric — the percentage of words that can be cut without losing meaning — makes the problem quantifiable. Typical Official Style prose runs 50–70% lard.
Joseph Williams explained the same phenomenon from a linguistic perspective: when actions appear as nouns and agents disappear from subject position, readers must reconstruct the underlying meaning, increasing processing effort [@williams2006]. George Orwell identified the political dimension: obscure language conceals who does what to whom, which serves those in power [@orwell1946].
The vault’s style guide and plain language specification work against the Official Style through rules like “prefer active voice,” “prefer verbs over abstract nouns,” and “name the actor when responsibility matters.”
Related terms
- Paramedic Method — Lanham’s procedure for revising the Official Style
- readability — the Official Style reduces readability through syntactic complexity
- plain language movement — the movement opposing institutional prose conventions
- language and power — the Official Style encodes institutional power relations in prose