El informe — The Report

Why Spanish reports sound the way they do

An English speaker reading a Spanish administrative document for the first time often finds it heavy: long sentences, abstract nouns, passives, impersonal constructions and almost no I or we. It can feel evasive. It is better understood as a different set of expectations. Spanish public writing descends from a legal and administrative tradition in which a document's authority comes from its impersonality. A report to a council is not one consultant's opinion but a technical finding, and the language is built to sound like one: los datos indican, cabe señalar, se constata. Nominalizations let a single sentence carry an action, its date, its cost and its responsible body, which is exactly what an official reader scans for. The ser passive with an agent, fue aprobado por el pleno, matters because in public administration the question who decided this is the important one. There has been a long push in the other direction. Since the 1990s, guides to lenguaje claro, plain language, have been produced by government departments, universities and the courts, and several regional administrations now require clearer drafting in documents addressed to citizens. The Real Academia Española has supported the movement. Carmen's advice, a five-line summary on page one, main idea first, no unreadable officialese, is the plain-language position applied to a consultant's report. So the skill is double. Learn to write the impersonal, nominal register, because it is what earns a technician's trust, and learn its limits, because a report nobody can read is not being read. Alex's last remark is common among people who work in a second language: the effort of choosing every word tends to produce prose that is more deliberate, and often better, than what they write at speed in their own.