Language Cancer / Bureaucratese
Updated 2026-08-05
INTRODUCTION
English translation pending.
CORE DEFINITION
A style of writing common in bureaucracies and academic settings, characterized by nominalization, passive voice, and stacked abstractions that conceal who did what. By removing agents and converting actions into nouns, it obscures responsibility and makes the text harder to evaluate. The core claim is that linguistic form shapes thought, so obscure writing produces obscure thinking. The qualification is that some technical and legal writing requires precision, so the objection is to needless obscurity rather than to formal register as such.
SCAFFOLDING EFFECT
Reduce cognitive load
- Use Nominalization Hunt: Find constructions that turn actions into abstract nouns and restore the verb. - Use Agent Restoration: Rewrite passive sentences so the actor who did the thing is visible. - Use Sentence Splitting: Break long stacked sentences so the subject and the action can be identified.
Anchor fast decisions
Converting actions into nouns removes the actor from the sentence, so responsibility becomes grammatically invisible and the reader cannot tell who did what. Because comprehension requires reconstructing the missing agent and action, the text consumes more effort while conveying less, and the writer can avoid committing to any claim. The habit then feeds back into thought, since writing in this register makes vague reasoning feel acceptable.
MINIMUM ACTION
In progress 0/1Practice this model in one real situation:
account_treeGenealogyexpand_more
menu_bookReferencesexpand_more
Source support: Explicit
- zh.wikipedia.orghttps://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%AA%9E%E8%A8%80%E7%99%8Cverified
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