Shall constitute

The JC’s guide to writing nice.™ Go Premium Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Plain English Drafting Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

I think, therefore I shall be deemed to be constituted.

—Graham Descartes

A legal way of saying “is”. It scores over to be in that it is highly regular: the different forms of a given tense require no conjugation:

I shall constitute | I am
You shall constitute | You are
He, she or it shall constitute | He, she or it is
We shall constitute | we are
You shall constitute | You are
They shall constitute | They are

On the other hand it is the most violent offender against the mores of plain English.

“Be” is the citadel; it sits on a velvet cushion in the most heavily fortified dungeon of the keep. There is no plainer word than be. It is the first word a non-English speaker learns on her long journey to being culturally hegemonised. There is no-one — not the dullest first grade student, who doesn’t understand profoundly what it means.

“Constitute” adds nothing to “be”. It is no more specific, no more precise, there is no nuance of meaning it captures that “be” does not.