Last week I had a 5-day migraine, or maybe that was 6 migraines in 5 days. That’s my annual allowance in a single week.

I tell you not to gain sympathy (oh all right, if you insist) but because it reminded me just how amazing our faculty of sight is. And especially the gift of reading. I bang on about accessibility all the time, but the problems for me personally are largely hypothetical. In real life, I can usually read and write. How marvellous is that?

But last week text splintered into bits and bobs, holes appeared in paragraphs, book pages pulsed with yellow and grey polka dots, staircases and shells and sparkling diamonds competed for my attention, and I could not fixate on more than one word at a time.

And although I am a gun touch typist, errors; ega appearing on mewhave i wort. [Sic: that was a demo.] I couldn’t recognise a typo if it jumped off the screen and bit me; it was just another blur. Moreover, the words I wanted were often just out of — what’s that word — stretch, beach, windsurfer, pie — reach!

Nothing new here, just the duration of that particular brain blitz in the experience of one of the world’s neurologically privileged. A migraine is a small stroke. We don’t like them.

But after my second visit to the GP I came away relieved that this was “only” a migraine. It passed. It got no worse. It’s not eye disease or a brain tumour. Which means this week I revert to reading with ease.

Lucky people like me take sight and reading for granted. Even so, it’s not easy reading on a screen. Computer work is the main cause of a heck of a lot of people’s migraines. I’m fine today, but super-sensitised, I dare say. I can still see glimmering patches of light and shadow on the screen, and those letters are not entirely still. I dare say our clever brains usually edit out these flaws.

When writing web content, have mercy on your readers. Orderliness and white space help us. So does conciseness. So I’ll stop now.

When I was a kid I used to wonder what a ‘patron’ was. Having a patron for a voluntary organisation like the Girl Guides seemed gratuitious if not smarmy at the time.

So why am I grinning inanely today?

Plain English Power has a patron now, and we’re thrilled. The name David Russell represents something special to New Zealanders. David Russell is probably our all-time supreme consumer advocate, widely respected for a combination of fairness, commonsense, doggedness and courtesy. Oh yes: and of course clarity.

With such a patron, we hope everyone will instantly understand that Plain English Power is not the grammar police, but a determined campaign to get government to publish everyday information in language we understand.

Meantime people have been joining Plain English Power at the rate of about ten a day. Come on in! It’s free and there are no obligations. You just have to believe one commonsense thing before breakfast… Namely, that public information should be written in a way that is easy to understand.

Am I straying from the theme of Contented? Hardly, because truckloads of government information are published on the Web. Don’t get me wrong: many national and local government bodies make a strenuous effort to write plain English for the public. We just want that to become the norm.

The invaluable Plain English Lexicon analyses 1200 words that occur frequently in British public-information documents. Which words will lay people understand? It’s not as simple as choosing 1-syllable words over 3-syllable words every time.

The lexicon draws on research evidence in the US ‘Living Word Vocabulary’ and the British National Corpus of 100m words. Each word has a plainer alternative, and many have a recommendation for use. A few examples below will give you the flavour. As you’ll see, the lexicon is realistic and practical, and entirely non-pedantic. It’s kind to the poor public servant caught between a rock (bureaucratic jargon, some of which is useful) and a hard place (a too-rigid interpretation of plain English).

Accrue / be added to, gather / This is a hard word, and a hard word to replace without loss of meaning.
acquaint (yourself with) / make familiar, find out about, read / ‘Please acquaint yourself with the details’ is not obscure but pompous: ‘please read…’.
authority (local gov’t) / council, local council / For brevity, ‘local council’ is preferable to ‘local authority’, and ‘council’ stands better on its
own than ‘authority’.
axiomatic / self-evident
chronic (illness) / lasting a long time / The difference between ‘chronic’ and ‘acute’ is often lost on patients.

Martin Cutts of the UK Plain Language Commission prepared this valuable resource.

Would you like to join a brand new New Zealand network of plain English supporters? (Free.) We need you!
Please look at our goals.

If you want to join, please email me.

And say how you would like to be described, for example:

Lesley Evans, artist
John Smith, Wellington City Councillor
James Cook, Maritime Services of NZ

Your name would then be posted on the site as a supporter.

Thank you for joining, I hope.

PS We have no intention of flooding you with emails. One every six months, maybe, if we have good news to report?

PPS Please spread the word. High numbers will bring traction
and action when we seek to influence government. So will group memberships.

The writing rooms of famous writers: see them on the Guardian web site. Bother Miriam Richardson for telling me about this page: it is fascinating. So this writer has just wasted an hour looking and reading about where other writers write. Want to waste some time? Call it writer’s research.

Writing Style for Print vs. Web: Jakob Nielsen waxes philosophical on the differences between writing for the Web and print. And praises the campfire and books as superior learning media.

Summary:

Linear vs. non-linear.
Author-driven vs. reader-driven.
Storytelling vs. ruthless pursuit of actionable content.
Anecdotal examples vs. comprehensive data.
Sentences vs. fragments.

Hillary vs. Barack: Who had the smartest media strategy? asks Antony Young on the Advertising Age. Fascinating analysis.
The verdict:

Obama wins overall. His campaign’s ability to create personal relationships via mass-marketing techniques characterized his media strategy. The employment of digital media channels — notably his website, use of social media and e-mail marketing — helped gain younger voter support and proved effective in fundraising, a critical factor in sustaining a heavy marketing effort. His early strategy to build his brand, and later deliver a more targeted broadcast media schedule that was supported by on-the-ground events and one to one media programs, helped him to build momentum in Iowa and allowed him to launch his campaign as a viable contender. Clinton’s campaign was very effective in adjusting its strategies, and dollar-for-dollar outperformed Obama in traditional broadcast.

If you haven’t seen the Obama Girl episodes on YouTube, look and laugh. Read the rest of this entry »

Pepi Ronalds on A List Apart got a rush of comments on a post lamenting the fact that content is the last to be considered or delivered, even on brilliant web developments. Hm, sounds familiar. Here’s a sample of this witty and tragic article.

Like many other clients, my it’s-been-three-years-and-I-still-don’t-have-the-content client had a patchwork of words produced by subject matter experts with no training as writers and no guidance. While they may know their area (a profession, a department, a product) quite well, and are sometimes able to write lucidly, subject matter experts are seldom sensitive to the nuances of the English language. They also tend to pay little attention to the wording for miscellaneous pages, forms, submission messages, pop-up boxes, and so on. As a consequence, website content often fails to reflect the thought and planning that goes into the rest of the site. The language on sites built this way is almost always inconsistent: spelling, grammar rules, tone, and voice are like flotsam and jetsam on the shores of a sea of information. My guy knows this. He just needs time to sit down and fix it all. To, er, give it a good edit.

Image from that very article on A List Apart.