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Amtsdeutsch, and the official campaign against it
German bureaucratic language is a national joke and also a national project. The joke is old: Amtsdeutsch, Behördendeutsch, Beamtendeutsch, all words Germans use about the letters they receive from their own state. The project is more recent and more interesting, because the state has been trying to do something about it. Two registers sit below the official one and both have names. Einfache Sprache, plain language, is ordinary German written for clarity — shorter sentences, active verbs, no unnecessary jargon. Leichte Sprache, easy language, is a much more strongly regulated register with its own rule set: very short sentences, one statement each, no subordinate clauses, no passive, no genitive, explanations of difficult words, often with illustrations. It exists for readers with cognitive disabilities or very limited German, and German accessibility law obliges federal authorities to provide information in it in defined circumstances. You will see a Leichte Sprache link on federal websites, and reading one is an instructive exercise for a learner — it is the same content as the Amtsdeutsch version with all four features from this lesson removed. The broader effort goes under Bürokratieabbau, the reduction of bureaucracy, which is a permanent item in German politics and produces periodic simplification of forms and letters. Progress is real but uneven, which is why lesson 77's Bescheid still reads the way it does. What matters for you is that the direction of travel is toward plain German, so writing clearly is not a foreigner's shortcut but the thing German public communication is itself aiming at. A word about your own writing, because the temptation runs the other way. Learners who have worked through a year of official German often start producing it, on the reasonable theory that the complicated register is the advanced one. It is not: it is a specialised register with narrow uses, and deploying it in an email to a colleague reads as stiff or faintly comic. The genuinely advanced skill is the one Yusuf demonstrates — being able to move in both directions and choosing deliberately. A B2 writer who produces clear, correct, plain German and can also produce a formal letter when one is needed is in a better position than one who produces Nominalstil everywhere. Finally, the two pieces of German writing advice that circulate most and are both worth taking. Knapp und treffend — concise and apt. And Ein Satz, ein Gedanke — one sentence, one thought. Neither is specific to German, and both are harder to follow in a language that permits a verb to arrive twenty words after its subject. Which is precisely why German style guides keep repeating them.