Officialese: How to Find It and Remove It From Your Writing

"Issue the passes" sounds right in a memo — that's what memos are for. Officialese is what happens when the phrasing of official documents shows up in writing that doesn't need it. The same phrase in an email to a colleague feels foreign, because you'd never actually talk that way.

A single stock phrase is a different thing from a style built out of many of them. "The aforementioned" or "in light of the above" won't sink a paragraph on their own; a dozen of them in one paragraph will.

Where does it come from, if we don't talk this way naturally? In plain terms, officialese is a kind of armor. It makes writing sound more serious, hides responsibility ("a decision was made" — by whom?), and saves the trouble of finding your own words when stock phrases are lying around. Another cause is school and college, where a formal tone was treated as a sign of a well-written paper.

The problem isn't that stiff words are ugly. They slow reading down: instead of an action, the reader gets a noun; instead of an actor, a passive construction; and the meaning has to be reconstructed. So first, find officialese by its signs — then remove it with techniques.

The signs of officialese repeat from one piece to the next, so they can be caught almost mechanically. Below are seven markers. If several show up in a row in one paragraph, rewrite the whole paragraph rather than patching word by word.

• Nominalizations. "Conduct," "implementation," "provision of," "utilization" — the action is hidden inside a noun, and the verb turns into a prop.
• Passive voice with no actor. "A decision was made," "the work was completed" — by whom is anyone's guess.
• Noun chains. "The matter of raising the level of customer service quality" — five nouns in a row, most of them piled onto each other.
• Prepositional stuffing. "For the purpose of," "in connection with," "in the event that," "with regard to," "in the context of."
• Verb-of-being fillers. "Is," "constitutes," "serves as," "is in the nature of."
• Filler qualifiers. "The aforementioned," "the said," "the applicable," "the relevant," "certain."
• Ritual lead-ins. "It should be noted that," "it is worth emphasizing," "as is well known," "we would like to draw your attention to the fact that."

Clichés sit next to these signs — "at this point in time," "in today's world," "plays a significant role." They're not officialese by themselves, but they live in the same neighborhood and get removed with the same techniques.

The techniques below run from the most common swaps to the finer ones. To remove officialese from writing, you don't need to apply all twelve to every sentence — the first five usually cover most of it, and the rest are for phrases that still sound stiff afterward. That's the real answer to how to write in plain English: not memorizing word lists, but seeing the mechanism.

The bureaucratic language examples below are collected into a table you can copy and keep beside you while editing. The replacement on the right isn't the only option — try it and check that the meaning holds.

What do you replace an officialese phrase with if it's not in the table? The same mechanism: turn a noun of action into a verb, a compound phrase into a simple one, a general word into a specific one. Every writer's personal list of bureaucratic phrases is different, and you'll have to keep finding new ones yourself.

Officialese in a business letter shows up most often because the writer is afraid of sounding unserious. Below is a service-desk notice and its version after applying the techniques from this article.

Notice that nothing new was added to the letter. The temptation to add "we'll get to it as soon as possible" is real, but that promise isn't in the original, so it doesn't belong in the edit. Editing for style shouldn't change what's actually promised — that rule holds for any piece of business correspondence.

Stiff phrasing isn't a language mistake — it's a tool that belongs to certain genres. Formal writing calls for precision, standard formulas, and no emotional coloring, and officialese does that job well there. Stripping it out of a legal document means changing the genre, and sometimes the legal meaning too.

• the piece is a contract, an order, a legal notice, a complaint, or a response to an official inquiry;
• the wording is fixed by a template, regulation, or law;
• the phrase might be quoted in a dispute, where precision matters more than ease of reading;
• the reader expects exactly that tone, and casual language would read as unserious.

Everywhere else, officialese only gets in the way: letters, newsletters, posts, instructions, website copy. A simple test: if the document gets signed, keep the formal language; if it gets read, remove it.

You can check writing for officialese quickly if you work through a list instead of going by feel. Copy the checklist and run through it before you send anything.

• No prop verbs like "conduct," "perform," "carry out," "ensure" sitting next to nouns of action.
• "Is," "constitutes," "serves as" have been replaced or removed.
• Every passive construction either names the actor or the actor genuinely doesn't matter.
• No noun chains longer than three nouns in a row.
• "For the purpose of," "in connection with," "in the context of," "with regard to," "in the event that" replaced with simple prepositions.
• "The aforementioned," "the said," "the applicable," "the relevant" cut out.
• No ritual lead-ins like "it should be noted that."
• Abstract "measures," "matters," "aspects" replaced with specifics.
• The piece has been read out loud, and nothing made you stumble.

Style is only one layer of editing. If you want to go deeper — into structure and logic — there's a separate guide on editing your own writing in seven passes.

If a paragraph stubbornly sounds stiff and there's no time to break it down, hand the first pass over to a tool. In iBro's "Text Improver," you paste in a piece of text and click "Improve text" — the tool removes officialese and tautology and sharpens the wording. The result appears next to the original, so every change is visible. If the edit felt too cautious, click "Improve text" again under the result: the tool resends the same original text and produces a new, independent result — not a continuation of the previous one, there's no memory between runs.

You can copy the result, download it as a file (PDF or .docx), or share a link; past runs are saved in request history for 30 days. Characters per request: up to 6,000. Free runs per day without an account: 3 — a limit shared across all of iBro's AI tools; terms for registered accounts are on the pricing page.

The honest caveat: the tool edits form, not content. It doesn't know which phrase your organization's policy requires, and it might swap out a mandatory formula for a natural one. So don't run contracts or official responses through it — but for letters and posts, check the result against the original with the checklist above. Try it on one paragraph in the Text Improver and compare it to what you'd have done by hand.

Officialese doesn't get removed through talent — it gets removed through habit: spot the sign, apply the technique, check by reading aloud, repeat. Start with the two most common swaps — restore the verb, name the actor — and most of the stiffness disappears. Keep the swap table and checklist handy when you edit, and leave formal language alone in documents, where it belongs. You can run a letter or post draft through the Text Improver first, then finish the pass by hand with the checklist.