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.
