250-word sentence

In the 1980s, I worked in an office with people who value clear communications as much as I do. We were, after all, public relations professionals. We shared with each other examples of communications efforts that sometimes were instructive and at other times made us laugh — or cringe.

One day, for fun, I was inspired to try to create a single sentence of about 250 words that said, “Keep it simple.” I laced it with some shots at bureaucracy. (We worked in a state-run academic medical center.)

My colleagues enjoyed it. The assistant director went a step further. He had one of the secretaries type it up and send it as a memo from him to the personnel office, as human resources offices were called back then.

Here it is:

In preparing interdepartmental and intradepartmental memoranda, requisitions, policy statements and other similar necessary correspondence related to matters such as and including employee principal function evaluative procedures, fiscal responsibility in implementing cost containment procedures, appropriate temporary storage of personal and/or state-owned motorized vehicular transportation, schedules for ingestion of requisite nutritional matter (whether in the institutional refectory or another approved setting) or periodic maintenance of electronic, telemetric and porcelain equipment, such documents shall be kept to overall minimal lengths and shall utilize succinctness and cogency so as to attain optimal effectiveness due to maximum circulation, retention and application, manifest clarity of purpose and minimal exhaustion of institutional, natural and human resources, and it is suggested that all such written conveyances for which these regulations may be applicable conform to guidelines set forth by the executive assistant to the governor’s vice chief of staff’s select committee on the achievement of clarity of program mission at every organizational level, except where exemptions may be deemed necessary and justified because of state, Federal or local regulations, special departmental needs or other exemptions as outlined in the report of the task force on exemptions appointed by and functioning under the direction of the administrative assistant to the adjunct associate state attorney general (version revised January 1978), and in doing so the management will ensure that information flow is facilitated in a manner consistent with the short-, intermediate- and long-term goals and objectives of the organization, although this memorandum and the data cited herein should in no way be interpreted to indicate that these goals and objectives are not being effectively implemented currently, but rather that this will invoke additional means to the end and will further coalesce resources already at our disposal.