[John Locke, "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding" (1690)
from Michael Quinlen's World Wide Words
Congratulations to the Clark County School Board who, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal on April 12, 1998, adopted a clear and simple harassment policy:Harassment will not be tolerated, regardless of its basis.and, from the Alberta Public Utilities Board's Natural Gas Service Rules:If you want us to start supplying you with natural gas, you have to tell us so and, as soon as posssible, sign an application for service. Municipal bylaws, or the Gas Protection Act, may require you to get permits before you can take service at a new or changed delivery point. Getting those permits is up to you.Education is a government service that ought to know how to write better. Some bad examples:"Our school's cross-graded, multiethnic, individualized learning program is designed to enhance the concept of an open-ended learning program with emphasis on a continuum of multiethnic, academically enriched learning using the identified intellectually gifted child as the agent or director of his own learning. Major emphasis is on cross-graded, multethnic learning with the main objective being to learn respect for the uniqueness of a person."On a report card:Restraint and caution should be used when interpreting this document. Under no circumnstances should this document be considered as a basis for drawing broad-based conclusions about or result in negative actions, especially physical, on the learner.
It is possible to write about scientific topics in understandable language.Science is vulnerable to public perception according to the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council which now asks applicants to
The Grants Guide from the Chairs in the Management of Technological Change, A Strategic Joint Initiative of The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and SSHRC posted to the Internet June 30, 1998 requires that scientists applying for grants must be learn to
- provide a summary in plain language
- or to use lay terms to state exactly what you intend to do, the reasons for doing it, and the results you expect: For example, new guidlines say, "We are asking that researchers provide a public summary in plain language, which would explain and justify their research in language that their teenage children or parents would understand."
Summarize in plain, non-technical language (comprehensible by lay audiences) the nature of the proposal, its objectives, the activities that will be undertaken in pursuit of these objectives, the results to be achieved, and the relation of the proposed activities/results to Canadian needs or opportunities.From New Scientist IPC Magazine,on May 24, 1997, Feedback, Pg. 96, this report:
Feedback -- In the spirit of bringing their science to the masses, the good physicists at the US government's Fermilab decided it would be an excellent idea to extract the salient points from some of their research results and put them on their Web site in what they describe as "plain English". Having had a glance at them, Feedback wonders just which dialect of this plain tongue the scientists were speaking.
"The Standard Model of particle physics is a non-Abelian theory and therefore predicts that the gauge bosons interact with each other, allowing coupling vertices such as W-W-Z and W-W-photon. The value of the couplings may be modified by radiative corrections involving particles predicted by extensions to the Standard Model such as Supersymmetry. Models based on substructure of the gauge bosons would also lead to non Standard Model or 'anomalous' couplings ... "What this boils down to, in the kind of plain English we are more used to, is, we think:"We reckon that if our results look funny then the theory is probably wrong."To see how plain language in science really looks, scientists can look to Science News at http://www.sciencenews.org/
Support for plain language comes from many sources... Canada Press reported in Financial News released February 20, 1998:Fred Harris of Fletcher Challenge Canada"The company will only agree to a straight-forward, plain language contract that everyone understands and commits to," Harris said. "There can be no ambiguity of language to ensure a smooth implementation of an agreement."
In March the San Francisco Examiner mocked Siegal & Gales Head consultant Alan Siegel whose group was hired to help the Girl Scouts modernize their image, Siegal said,
"We have to prioritize their programs. We have to help them synthesize their programs into coherence and relevence."
Siegal & Gale have provided plain language services to corporations for years.
See How business benefits from plain language And, the Securities and Exchange Commission's new guidebook for plain language disclosure documents: at http://www.sec.gov/news/handbook.htm
Many legal organizations (Canadian Bar Association, Legal Writing Institute, Legal Secretaries, International Inc., CLARITY) support plain language: see http://www.web.net/~raporter/LegalLanguage/The Canadian Bar Association promotes plain language and considers it the lawyer's responsibility to ensure his or her clients understand matters of importance. The Lawyers for Literacy Information Kit is online at http://www.cle.bc.ca/literacy
Or read: Why use plain language in the legal profession? in Rapport: News about plain language.
The American Bar Association publication, Law Practice Management, reported in September, 1997 at Vol. 23;No. 6;Pg.48:
A woman almost diedThe Seattle Times reported in the January 14, 1998, Wednesday Final Edition, BUSINESS; Pg. C1:"because her caregivers didn't understand the legalese in a document. "The woman's power of attorney named a man we'll call Joe," says Wayne Nelson, a nursing home ombudsman for the State of Oregon. "The document didn't define 'power of attorney.' So when Joe demanded the facility withdraw food and water from [the woman], the staff obeyed."
Mr. Nelson was asked to intervene to explain the limits of a power of attorney and get the woman to a hospital.
After giving three hours of highly technical testimony in federal court yesterday, a computer expert for the Justice Department may have best captured the gist of this week's antitrust hearings with the one non-technical thing he said...Despite the computer expert's opinion, legal English has no excuse for being different from Plain English."This is a legal document," said Weadock, gesturing at a copy of the judge's order. "Legal English is often quite different than plain English."
Even U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, who wrote the order, chuckled at that, but the statement summed up well the semantic wrangling that is now dominating the government's antitrust case against Microsoft..."
For the text of resolutions in support of plain language, see Supporting documents
Smart lawyers adopt the clear-writing methods proposed by forward-thinking legal groups to avoid becoming the butt of lawyer jokes like those at Nolo Press's web page of jokes about lawyers and obfuscatory language: http://www.nolo.com/jokes/obfusc.html
Learn how to apply a plain language approach at Jakob Nielsen's personal site. His page at: http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/ links you to a short summary, a full paper, and case study on using concise, scannable, and objective writing on the Web.Back to press releaseAt Nielsen's one-page AlertBox http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9710a.html there is a set of examples supporting his recommendation that:
"... Web pages have to employ scannable text, using highlighted keywords (hypertext links serve as one form of highlighting; typeface variations and color are others), meaningful sub-headings (not "clever" ones), bulleted lists, one idea per paragraph (users will skip over any additional ideas if they are not caught by the first few words in the paragraph), the inverted pyramid style, starting with the conclusion, half the word count (or less) than conventional writing"