• U.S.

THE ADMINISTRATION: Paper Doll

3 minute read
TIME

Time was when the U.S. bureaucracy measured its girth in red tape. Nowadays the proper measure is paper (only a few yards of red tape are still used each year, mainly to bind treaties). This week a Hoover Commission task force estimated that the Government’s paper work is costing the taxpayers $4 billion a year. By economizing in carbon copies, cutting down on gobbledygook and other reforms, the task force reckoned the Government could save a tidy $255 million annually.

Miles of Files. Easily the biggest item in Washington’s paper problem is mail. Each working day the Government’s typewriters and duplicating machines clack out 4,000,000 letters at the rate of 139 a second. In a year’s time the flow swells to 1 billion letters. Average cost: $1 per letter. In the year 1912, the average Government worker wrote 55 official letters; in 1954 the average worker wrote 522. Some 750,000 U.S. employees do nothing but paper work.

As its chief correspondence investigator, the Hoover group wisely chose tall and talented Mona Sheppard, who has been trying for years to simplify and improve the style of Government letters, and to reduce the almost endless files (24 million cu. ft. of them in 2,000,000 file cabinets —enough to stretch in a single drawer from the Pentagon to the Kremlin). Among the task-force recommendations is a new correspondence style board with authority over letter-perfection in every nook and cranny of the Government. Likeliest candidate for chairman: Mona Sheppard.

At 48, Mona is the Government’s No. expert on letters. Her pamphlet on style, her precooked form paragraphs, and her mail-room short cuts are standard in many Government offices. Her nix-list of 150 avoidable words and phrases is well known to Washington letter writers. Samples: Held in abeyance (wait is better), at the earliest possible moment (“this may be the moment the letter arrives”), finalize, (a “manufactured” word), in the near future (“say soon”), attached please find (“attached is is adequate”).

Jingles & Backlogs. As a girl, Mona Sheppard came out of the University of Alabama with big plans for becoming a poetess, but when she found she was most successful at selling jingles to a greeting-card company, she got a job with the Treasury as a correspondence clerk and devoted herself to belles-lettres, government style. In time she became the top expert on managing the enormous correspondence programs of Government agencies. Four years ago she went to work for the National Archives, as a troubleshooter who ranged all over the Government improving the flow of words and mail.

In 1953 when the regional commissioner of Internal Revenue asked for funds for 47 new employees to help catch up with a backlog of 50,000 letters in Baltimore, he got Mona instead. She revamped the Baltimore office’s correspondence system, reduced the backlog to 3,000 letters without hiring a single new employee, and saved the Government $157,200 a year. The Sheppard system is now being adopted by all 64 district offices of the Internal Revenue Service, will ultimately save the taxpayers $5,500,000 a year.

In her spare time Mona collects great letters of famous writers (her favorites: Abraham Lincoln, Walter Hines Page), but is unable to keep up her own personal correspondence. Explains Mona: “I just can’t bring myself to write personal letters of my own.”

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