Halliday (2008: 108-9):
Over and above this feature of comprehensiveness, the metaphoric code has other features which, while they might be mildly dysfunctional in a scientific context, can be exploited to some effect when it is transported into a bureaucratic setting. It can be oblique, impersonal and ambiguous: “oblique” because it stands at several removes from experience; “impersonal” because agents and other participants are often left out; “ambiguous” because the signals of syntactic relations among elements are usually absent.