Now I want to discuss how we can do this:

To begin with, before you can put ideas into words, you must have ideas. Otherwise, you are attempting the impossible.

The written English we want is clean, clear prose - not elegant, not stylish, just clean, clear prose. It means simplifying, polishing and tightening.

Remember: That which is written without much effort is seldom read with much pleasure. The more the pleasure, you can assume, as a rule of thumb, the greater the effort.

When you send me or your minister a minute or a memo - or a draft that has to be published like the President's Address - do not try to impress by using big words; impress by the clarity of your ideas.

I speak as a practitioner. If I had not been able to reduce complex ideas into simple words and project them vividly for mass understanding, I would not be here.

The communists simplified ideas into slogans to sway the people's feelings - to get them to move in directions which would have done us harm. I had to counter them. I learnt fast. The first thing I had to do was to express ideas in simple words.

My experience is that attending courses helps but not as much as lessons tailored for you. You have written a memo. Somebody runs through it and points out your errors: 'You could have said it this way'; 'this is an error'; 'this can be broken into two sentences' and so on.

In other words, superiors and peers and even subordinates who spot errors should be encouraged to point them out. My personal assistants point out my mistakes; I tell them to.

Some final examples on how urgent the problem is, from two papers coming before Cabinet: The first, a very well-written paper; the other badly written. But even the well-written paper contained a repetitious phrase which confused me. Because it was well-written, I thought the repeated words must be there to convey a special meaning:

• 'If the basis for valuation is to be on a basis other than open market value as evidenced by sales, arbitrariness and protracted litigation would occur, thus tarnishing the credibility of government machinery.'

I ran my eye back to the opening words. I queried: 'Do we lose anything if we dropped the words 'to be on a basis' before 'other'.' Answer came back: 'No meaning is lost.' And this was in a well-written paper.

Let me read from the second paper, which tried to explain why we must set up an institute:

• 'The need for such services is made more acute as at present, there is no technical agency offering consultancy services in occupational safety and health.'

I asked: 'What's happening 'as at present'? Why 'as at present'?'

What the officer meant was: 'There is acute need because there is no department which offers advice on occupational safety and health.'

We have taken each other's mistakes. He had constantly read 'as at present', 'as of yesterday', 'as of tomorrow', so he just stuffed in three unnecessary words - 'as at present' - into his paper.

There is such a thing as a language environment. Ours is a bad one. Those of you who have come back from a long stay in a good English-speaking environment would have felt the shock when reading The Straits Times on returning.

I spent a month in Vancouver in October 1968. Then I went on to Harvard University in Boston. For one month, I read the papers in Vancouver. They were not much better than The Straits Times. They had one million people, English-speaking. But there was no sparkle in their pages.

The contrast in Harvard was dazzling. From the undergraduate paper, The Harvard Crimson, to the Boston Globe, from the New York Times to the Washington Post, every page crackled with novel ideas, smartly presented. Powerful minds had ordered those words. Ideas had been thought out and dressed in clean, clear prose. They were from the best trained minds of an English-speaking population.

Let us try to do better. We are not doing justice to ourselves. I know the ability is there; it has just not been trained to use the written word correctly and concisely. And it is not too late to start.

It is not possible to conduct the business of government by talking to each other with the help of gesticulation. You have to write it down. And it must be complete, clear and unambiguous.

This article was first published in The Straits Times.