The statutory audit

Le contrôle des écritures is the entry testing an auditor does, and the noun in the middle of it is one of the hardest-working words in French. Une écriture is, first of all, handwriting: il a une écriture illisible says nothing whatever about accounts. In the plural, and inside a company, les écritures are the books themselves — every posting made during the year — and the verb that goes with them is passer. Passer une écriture is to make an entry, tenir les écritures is to keep the books, and une écriture de régularisation is an adjusting entry. Then comes the third job, always plural and always capitalised: les Écritures are Scripture. English reaches for a different word each time — handwriting, entries, Scripture — and not one of them is « writing », which is why the middle sense is the one that catches a reader out. A sentence about des écritures antidatées is about back-dated journal entries and not about anybody’s hand. And there is a fourth: l’écriture of a novelist is the style, the one sense English really does call « writing ».