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'White Paper' contrasts with 'Blue Books,' other shades

'White Paper' contrasts with 'Blue Books,' other shades

January 1, 2019 By Mark Allen ACES News

A white paper is described by most dictionaries as an official or authoritative report, giving information and possibly proposing a course of action. It’s always puzzled me as a term, me being somewhat literal minded. If a paper is white, it is clean, a blank slate. Any paper providing information should be covered in black ink.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first recorded use of white paper to describe an official report was in an 1899 newspaper article:

“An interesting White Paper has been published … giving reports from our Ambassadors and Consular officers abroad on the telephone services in the countries to which they are attached.”

The article’s writer could have called it a report or simply a paper, both of which had been used in this sense for hundreds of years. We have to assume the writer knew the readers would understand or at least accept this use of white paper.

White paper, usually capitalized, is more commonly used in Great Britain. The term probably came about to distinguish a report from a blue book. A blue book is a bound collection of official documents. While a blue book may contain a range of information, a white paper is narrowly focused.

In his 1845 political novel Sybil, Benjamin Disraeli describes his hero’s library: “On another table were arranged his parliamentary papers, and piles of blue books.”

Blue book may have originated with the name of the second volume, produced in the 16th century, of a series of handwritten records of the Order of the Garter. That book was bound in blue velvet.

A blue book also is a small booklet on which students write essays for an exam. It is an informal term for Kelley Blue Book, which tracks the value of used cars. Of greater interest to copyeditors, Bluebook is a standard guide to legal citations.

The British government also issues green papers, which are preliminary reports published to provoke discussion.

White paper is used in Canada, but it is often associated with a 1969 statement of government policy that called for the elimination of special legal status for aboriginal people. Various responses to that unfortunate label included a red paper and a brown paper.

White papers need not come from government. The Purdue Online Writing Lab points out that white papersare often produced by a corporation or other organization to promote its value as a thought leader.

Header photo via ActionVance, Unsplash.

This article was originally posted on the Copyediting website, Feb. 12, 2015.

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