A report released earlier this week by the National Commission on Writing deplores the poor writing skills of far too many American workers in government and in private business. Sloppy writing leads to unclear communications, which leads to an annual remedial writing training bill of $221 million for taxpayers, the report stated.

Poor writing not only befuddles citizens, but also slows down the government as bureaucrats struggle with unclear instructions or have to redo poorly written work, the commission said.

“It’s impossible to calculate the ultimate cost of lost productivity because people have to read things two and three times,” said Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, vice chairman of the National Governors Association, which conducted the survey for the commission.

Anyone who has tried to decipher a typical government report or an explanation of the bizarre charges listed on his telephone bill, or a treatise in support of “ongoing review mechanisms” by the higher education crowd gets Huckabee’s drift. Show me the person who claims to understand one of those inscrutable privacy statements that the law compels the banks and credit card companies to issue periodically and I will show you a person who should be avoided at all costs.

Many bureaucrats and politicians seem not to grasp that simplicity is the key to good writing. But President Franklin D. Roosevelt was an exception, as writing guru William Zinsser noted in his book, “On Writing Well,” published 25 years ago by Harper and Row.

The Roosevelt anecdote involves this paragraph from a government memo concerning a 1942 wartime blackout order: “Such preparations shall be made as will completely obscure all federal buildings and non-federal buildings occupied by the federal government during an air raid for any period of time from visibility by reason of internal or external illumination…”

“Just tell them that in buildings where they have to keep the work going to put something across the windows,” FDR said.

Bob Kerrey, chairman of the National Commission on Writing, knows that when it comes to writing, simpler is better. The former U.S. senator, governor of Nebraska and Medal of Honor winner for valor in Vietnam, said that in public office he had read things that were “absolutely incomprehensible.” If the Declaration of Independence had been written in standard government-worker bureaucrat-speak, “It would have been 10 times as long, one-tenth as comprehensive, and would have lacked all originality,” Kerrey suggested.

He may be right.

Clear writing comes from clearing our heads of clutter, Zinsser advises. “Clear thinking becomes clear writing. One can’t exist without the other. It is impossible for a muddy thinker to write good English…”

The average reader has an attention span of about 20 seconds, the former New York Herald Tribune editor and Yale University professor explains, and he is assailed on every side by forces competing for his time. Newspapers. Television. Radio. Wife. Kids. Pets. Also by “his house and yard and all the gadgets he has acquired to keep them spruce; and by that most potent of competitors, sleep.”

The man snoozing in his chair with unfinished reading material on his lap is a man who was being given too much unnecessary trouble by the writer, Zinsser says. “And it won’t do to say that the snoozing reader is too dumb or too lazy to keep pace with the train of thought. My sympathies are with him…”

Much snooze-inducing writing can be laid at the feet of specialized jargon that attaches itself to a person’s occupation. “We are offering functional digital programming options that have built-in parallel reciprocal capabilities with compatible third-generation contingencies and hardware,” the computer company’s brochure informs potential customers. If that sentence doesn’t plunge you into a coma you probably should take your internal ongoing review mechanism in for a tune-up.

Such gobbledygook – clutter – is the root of most evil in writing. “Clutter is the ponderous euphemism that turns a slum into a depressed socioeconomic area, a salesman into a marketing representative, a dumb kid into an underachiever and garbage collectors into waste disposal personnel,” Zinsser advises. Writing improves in direct ratio to the number of things we can keep out of it that shouldn’t be there, he adds.

That’s sound advice for Kerrey’s commission in its quest to improve writing instruction in the classroom. I offer additional guidance for those who would write for newspapers: Strive to keep your writing brief, and always within your allotted space.

This lessens the chance that some stressed-out editor from the meat cleaver school of editing will whack your final paragraph in the middle of a

Columnist Kent Ward’s e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.