Awards time in the United States

It's that time of year when our friends in the US seek nominations for the ClearMark and WonderMark awards.

The ClearMark awards celebrate the best in clear communication and plain language from US government and not-for-profit organisations, and private companies.
Read more about the ClearMark awards

The WonderMark award is a chance to highlight documents that miss the mark and need to be written much more clearly to meet the reader's needs. 

The Center for Plain Language's website has lots of examples from earlier awards and they make for interesting reading. 

Later in the year, New Zealand's Plain English Awards will be taking place. And to get us thinking about what to nominate for our People's Choice 'Brainstrain' awards, take a look at some  documents that have received the WonderMark award. 
Read about the 2012 WonderMark awards

Read about the 2012 WriteMark New Zealand Plain English Awards

Plain language in regulations

We continue our series of guest posts with this piece from Dr Annetta Cheek. Annetta is an anthropologist by training, with a PhD from the University of Arizona. She worked for the US Government from 1980 until early 2007 and spent four years as the chief plain language expert on Vice President Al Gore's National Partnership for Reinventing Government. She was the chair of the federal interagency plain language advocacy group PLAIN, from when it was founded in 1995 until she retired from the government. She also administered the group’s website,
http://www.plainlanguage.gov.

Since retiring, Annetta has served as Chair of the board of the private sector Center for Plain Language. The Center held its third annual awards at the National Press Club in May 2012. Annetta is also the Director of Plain Language Programs for NOVAD Consulting and R3I Consulting, two Washington DC-based consulting firms.

In 2010, the United States Congress passed, and President Obama signed, the Plain Writing Act. That act requires agencies to write in plain language any material about public services and benefits. Plain language advocates, and especially the Center for Plain Language, had been advocating such an act for some years.

But noticeably missing from the act were government regulations. In fact, the act specifically excluded regulations from coverage. While regulations had been included in the first several versions of the bill, the provision was lost during the negotiations that are an integral part of the process of getting Congress to pass legislation. 

Reasons behind the loss of this provision included a concern that it would have been used as an excuse to stall regulations (“Take this back and rewrite it — it isn’t in plain language!”) and of course the old wives’ tale about plain language being imprecise. And during the campaign for the bill, a number of attorneys from federal agencies traipsed up to Capitol Hill to complain that writing in plain language was just too hard. I admit I was a bit surprised by that — while I know that writing in plain language is not nearly as easy as the outcome may make it look,  I’m not used to attorneys admitting that they can’t write something.

We believe that it’s critical for the government to write regulations in plain language. Regulations are the starting point for most, if not all, federal programs. All too often, confusing regulatory language flows down into the documents that go directly to the public. Statutory language is often obscure, and the public needs decent regulatory language to clear up the confusion. I worked on many programs during my 25 years as a federal employee in which members of the public read the regulations themselves. They didn’t want to have to pay some attorney or technical expert to explain the regulations to them. Nor should they have to. The government should write all its documents in a style that’s accessible to the intended reader.

We’ll be going back to Capitol Hill when the new Congress starts to meet. We’ll be talking to them again about plain language in regulations. And we’ll keep talking to them until we achieve our goal. It’s a battle worth fighting, and one that citizens in all countries should take on. 

Find out more about the Center for Plain Language

Find out more about the Plain Writing Act 2010

Plain language is good business

Candi Harrison offers this guest post. Candi is the former Co-Chair of the US Federal Web Managers Council. She has served as a judge for the WriteMark Plain English Awards and the ClearMark Awards for the past 3 years.

I worked on U.S. Government websites for 10 years; and I learned there’s one principle that trumps all others: if you don’t communicate effectively, you can’t serve effectively. If customers come to your website and cannot understand what you offer and how to get it, they leave and never come back. They tell their friends what a rotten website you have and, by extension, how bad you must be. 

How you communicate – the words you use and the ways you organize them – brands your organization as much as that little logo you use or those razzle dazzle graphics or those expensive ad campaigns. That’s why getting the words right – making them “plain” – is good business.

So how do you get the words right? You get to know your customers – how they think and how they talk.  You train everyone in your organization how to write right, and you reward staff members who improve your products.  You look for examples of good writing and emulate them. You watch your customers use what you’ve written, see where they stumble, and fix it. You find professionals to help you. You invest the time because it makes your product better and your customers happy.

There’s lots of help. The folks at WriteMark in New Zealand and the Center for Plain Language in the US offer great resources. Right now, WriteMark is offering a “free sample” of their services. Just send them a document or web page, and they’ll give you a mini-review. That gives you a place to start. 

Check out the winners of WriteMark’s Plain Writing Awards and the US ClearMark Awards, and use them as examples. Get your staff together to look at the winners. Talk about what works and why. Then see how you can apply those lessons to your own products. 

Businesses, non-profits, and governments all over the world are getting on the plain language band wagon.  Why?  Because it just makes sense. When your customers can find and use what they want, easily and effectively, they’re happy. Happy customers come back. They tell their friends. Plain language is good business.

Check out the WriteMark and the offer of a sample assessment

See the WriteMark Award winners

See the ClearMark Award winners

Find out more about the Center for Plain Language

Put your communications to the test

We love it when people discover the benefits of plain language! Better later than never, we say. In a recent blogpost, Simon Dudley of Logitech talks about connecting with your customers using plain language. No need for 'fluffy, marketing jargon,' he says. Simon has just discovered the Center for Plain Language, and it seems he's a convert!

He suggests taking a look at the Center's website, then taking a closer look 'to see if your company meets their standards'.

Read Simon's blogpost about plain language

Not to be outdone, in New Zealand, Write Limited has been making a noise about plain language for almost 25 years.

Read what Lynda Harris says about the business benefits of plain English