This plain language writing tip needs no explanation: the meaning is obvious. The reason is pretty obvious too. And yet it bears constant repetition, because people forget.

In a business or government office, meaningless jargon may become so common that many otherwise normal, healthy, intelligent people think it makes sense. If you work in certain environments, you bathe in gobbledegook as it streams out of memos, reports, policy, procedures, presentations and even press releases. You yourself start writing the same jargon, confident it’s the right way to go.

And you start to participate in a group hallucination. You get this extraordinary illusion that ordinary people can understand what you are saying. (Or care.)

Here’s a classic example, the first two paragraphs on a government web page:

Scion places a high emphasis on developing strategic partnerships to build stronger science capability and ensure the delivery of worthwhile outcomes.

We have developed a diverse range of relationships with other research organisations, industry groups, and commercial businesses, both nationally and internationally, to greatly expand the potential of science-related opportunities.

Flesch-Kincaid readability score: zero. That means virtually no adult reader will be able to understand it easily.

What does the author really mean, in plain language? We can figure that out. But in the end, is it worth saying?

First figure out what you really mean, then say that. If it’s worth saying, say it in plain language. If it’s not worth saying, don’t bother.

Scion: Key Working Relationships

A High Court judge has questioned whether the head of Maritime New Zealand broke the law by axing a Nelson company as a safe ship monitor.


Bad language is mentioned:

Mrs Reynolds attended the injunction and said Justice Miller criticised MNZ for language that was “pure consultant speak … and meaningless”.

It’s not unreasonable to infer, from the context, that fancy language could have been used deliberately. Now that’s not the norm, in my experience.

Gobbledegook usually results from habit, carelessness or misconceptions about good business writing—don’t you agree? I think it’s reasonable to assume that most officials are not motivated by an evil desire to hoodwink the public with long words. But in this case, the thought may cross your mind.

News item in Stuff.co.nz: Judge queries legality of move by Maritime NZ

I’ve been doing a web content review “lite” for government web sites in New Zealand, on behalf of Plain English Power. This means taking one web site at a time, viewing some of their content, picking a few pages that look hard to read, and testing their readability.

I copy the main content or the first few paragraphs into a Word document, and use Word to find the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease Score. Then I note any page with a score of 40 or under, one which fewer than 40% of adults can read with ease. Ideally, public government information should be at least 60 if not 70 on the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease Score.

I’m busy, so I only spend about 10 minutes maximum on each site.

So far I’ve checked sites A-D on the NZ Government directory. I’ve listed 150 pages with low readability. On these pages, 40 is a high reading — plenty have score of 20 or lower! They are seriously bad, and there’s no shortage. The erring web sites are frankly appalling. It’s obvious no effort has been made to translate long strings of multisyllabic bureaucratic gobbledegook into plain language. The site owners don’t care about the public. They are not talking to the public. They are talking to themselves.

At the other extreme are government web sites with excellent content. The owners have worked seriously hard to make the web sites not only comprehensible to the public, but useful. I don’t look for bad content here. They deserve applause, and I’m not here to nit-pick, just to assess the problems of government content.

In the middle of the scale sit a lot of government web sites that are readable, but pointless. They have translated the necessary information into short sentences so we can understand it. But they haven’t made the information useful to you and me. It doesn’t help us perform a task or get access to a government service. It just gives us, in plain and boring language, the basic information required by law.

So, government web sites in New Zealand are just like that brat of a girl:

There was a little girl
and she had a little curl
right in the middle of her forehead.
And when she was good
she was very very good,
and when she was bad she was horrid.

I’m very concerned about the horrid government web sites. They aren’t tools or communication channels: they are rusty old filing cabinets caught with their drawers open. Their content is a disgrace.

New Zealand Government Directory

Most of us feel we have a right to get official information in a form we can understand. But is a law necessary to enforce this? At PLAIN 2009 (just-finished conference in Sydney) the answer was a resounding “yes”.

Sweden is the poster-girl of plain language, and in Sweden, things are going “very well”. So we’d hope, with mandatory plain language legal drafting, a 3-year university course for plain language consultants, and various well funded organisations. The requirement for government agencies to write clearly was added to 2 existing laws in the 1980s, and this helped the cause “enormously” according to Anne-Marie Hasselrot, a language expert at the Swedish Government Offices.

Julie Clement reported that in the USA plain language initiatives in government are patchy, inconsistent and sometimes unprofessional. (In the past, memoranda from three presidents created surges of activity — but only in states, cities, towns and villages with enthusiastic officials.) Tireless plain language activists keep working to change this. They see, after decades of struggle, that only a law can make real impact on bureaucratic writing style: and the Plain Language in Government Communications Act is being processed by Congress right now.

South Africa has recently built plain language requirements into many important laws, such as a consumer protection act. Theirs is a different struggle and these new laws provide strong legal protection for citizens. “If you can’t understand your rights, then you don’t have any rights.”

Repeatedly we were told that executive-driven plain language initiatives are vulnerable. They can only be a short-term solution. Often funding is provided for one-off projects, and then dries up: then it’s back to square one. Sooner or later these independent initiatives lose momentum, and the results are always fragmented.

A change to plain language in government communications must be strongly supported at the highest level, we were told repeatedly… but even that’s not enough. When those high-level officials and politicians change their jobs or portfolios, their legacy in promoting clear communication can easily slip away forever.

The need for clear communication from government is permanent. We have always needed it and we always will. There’s no fear that a plain language law will become obsolete, and temporary, one-off initiatives will never be a total solution.

Maybe all countries don’t need an entirely new law dedicated to clear communication from government agencies. Maybe a new clause added to an existing law would be sufficient, as in Sweden. But regardless of the path taken, legal protection for the citizens’ right to clear, transparent information needs to be set in concrete.

End of rant.

PLAIN 2009 conference site

Far too much policy is dumped straight on the web.

• Policy is often legitimately complex.
• Policy is always hard to write and usually hard to read.
• People need instructions or procedures more often than policy.

Consultation policy documents need to be on the web, and government policy needs to be on the web. But once the policy of a non-government organisation or business is finalised, it’s usually only consulted by staff. That policy belongs out of public view—maybe on the intranet.

If you are trying to untangle policy for publication as useful information on the web, here are some tips.

1. Don’t start with the policy. Don’t cut and paste. Don’t rehash policy for the web. Instead, ask what your target audience really wants and needs. Is it a long-winded explanation of your policy? If not, start planning a new page from scratch.

2. Start with the people. Let people self-select into an appropriate category. Then they need to read only the information that applies to them. Use yes-no questions, for example: Are you under 18?

3. Focus on the task. Don’t try to combine instructions and procedures with the reasons behind them. Most readers just want to know what they have to do in order to achieve their goal.

4. If you must publish your organisation’s policy (perhaps for legal reasons), consider providing the original, authoritative document policy without editing. Maybe even (gulp! shock! horror!) as a PDF.

14-18 September 2009 is plainly a great week to draw the world’s attention to plain English.

On Friday, it’s the WriteMark New Zealand Plain English Awards—always a brilliant occasion.

Alice and I will provide four prizes. The winners of the following four categories will get access for one staff member to our brand new Contented Diploma in Web Content:

• Best Plain English Website—Public Sector/Non-Government Organisation
• Best Plain English Website—Private Sector
• People’s Choice—best Plain English Website
• People’s Choice—‘Brainstrain’ Website

All through Plain English Week, remember this:
It’s not your fault if you don’t get it: tell the writer!

• Say the magic words, “What do you mean?”
• If you are given a confusing document to read, ask for a plain English translation.

Today I ticked my answer to a ridiculous citizens initiated referendum.

Should a smack as part of good parental correction be a criminal offence in New Zealand?

When I first saw the wording I gave a big sigh. We’ve been here before. Maybe there’s something about citizens’ referenda that means inevitably they will have clumsy wording that’s hard to understand. I remember this one:

Do you agree that the number of professional firemen should not fall below the number employed nationally as at 31 January 1996?

In front of the voting booth people were standing around scratching their heads. What does it mean? That one looked pretty straightforward, but even so it was discombobulating. Apparently many people voted the opposite way to their intentions.

Why? Because we want to say yes to something we agree with. Yes to something good, no to something bad. Sure, that’s not logical –but it’s human. Negative language is not just a linguistic factor: it has a powerful psychological impact.
Firemen=good, we think. Should vote yes. But that means voting to something negative, that they should not fall… It does your head in.

That looked like sloppiness, not manipulation. But today’s referendum is an obvious attempt to manipulate voters with loaded emotive words. However, those Machiavellian efforts will backfire for a similar reason. In the end, the mix of positive and negative is too confusing. If people have to read it three times to figure out which way to vote, the results will be no guide to what the nation thinks.

• smack: probably a neutral word for most NZers, or even positive: just a little tap with the hand to stop a toddler from doing something bad..
• good: means good, right? So a smack is good. OK, got it so far.
• parental. Parents are good. We are in favour of parents. So this part of the statement is loaded.
• correction: I have no idea what this means. All things to all people, I guess. I didn’t see my main role as a parent as correcting my kids although sometimes they needed helping, saving or stopping. That makes me a great big leftie softie but hey, my kids grew up to be terrific human beings, so there.
• criminal offence: bad, bad, bad.

So the emotional (not literal) meaning of the referendum is:

Should a good thing be a bad thing?

Why, no! I feel that a good thing should be a good thing, not a bad thing. So I’ll vote no, says my heart. Hang on, says my head…

Well, the exercise will be a fabulous waste of time and effort, as the government is comfortable with the law as it is, and the Prime Minister has declared the results of the referendum will be ignored.

Here’s another question:

Should every citizen’s referendum be in plain language?

Now that’s an easy one. And here’s another question:

How on earth was this impossible question translated into other languages?

A McKinsey Quarterly article on E-government 2.0 concludes that government use of the internet is far from reaching its potential. Jason Baumgarten and Michael Chui look approvingly at early initiatives and coolly at what’s happening now:

Despite spending enormous amounts on Web-based initiatives, government agencies often fail to meet users’ needs online.

Baumgarten and Chui are clear about why e-government seems to have stalled, and have three instructions. They’re talking about the USA, and it’s worth thinking about.

No use doing any one of these three if the other two are ignored. E-government is not a trendy add-on to government bureaucracy. It means re-examining the whole shebang — starting with the org-chart. Who’s in charge? Who has the expertise? Can we afford any technological naivete in management?

To reach the next level in e-government services, organizations must overcome each of these obstacles. First, they must move to a governance model in which e-government initiatives are owned by “line of business” executives and supported by a dedicated, cross-functional team. Second, they must develop capabilities in critical areas such as marketing, usability, Web analytics, and customer insights. Finally, government agencies must shift mind-sets to proactively get citizens, businesses, and other agencies involved in contributing or creating applications and content.

This is the bit that Contented can help with, in our own small way: must develop capabilities in [...] marketing, usability, [...] and customer insights. Our Diploma in Web Content is one way that thousands of web content authors in government can gain those skills.

Does that seem a stretch to you? Well, the old p-government involved thousands of government employees working on paper and shifting those pieces of paper around. Some pieces went to the public. Marketing was seen as a discrete specialty. Even writing plain language was seen by some as an arcane specialty, done by the communications department and unrelated to everyday work! Government agencies should not be ivory towers or even contain ivory towers… but they did, and some still do.

When government went online, every document became a marketing tool — like it or not. Every document should be fuelled by customer insights. Many a government employee who writes at work now writes stuff that directly affects the public.

It’s a huge turnaround from paper writing to web writing and there’s a lot at stake. Million dollar ICT projects can fail if the content is written with a paper world in mind.

A New York Times editorial talks about an initiative to pour government data on to the Web for all to see and use. Says the NYT:

With little fanfare, the Obama administration has begun its first agency feeds onto Data.gov, a new Web site. Mr. Kundra promises to release vast amounts of raw data there, so taxpayers can see what’s going on more instantly and clearly, and, ideally, come back with suggestions on how to fix government problems.

Barack Obama is pushing hard to make government more transparent. He’s also a strong proponent of plain language. So I sent this email to Data.gov:

A great initiative. But let’s have plain language throughout the site, no exceptions. On the home page this is a sentence many will struggle with:

“Although the initial launch of Data.gov provides a limited portion of the rich variety of Federal datasets presently available, we invite you to actively participate in shaping the future of Data.gov by suggesting additional datasets and site enhancements to provide seamless access and use of your Federal data.”

President Obama strongly favours plain language. More clarity will help people use the site with ease.

I’d love our New Zealand government to imitate data.gov. Thank you!

Data.gov. Take a peek.
Photo (c) Edinburgh University Data Library

Report cards in plain English: that’s what New Zealand’s Ministry of Education wants. This is part of a larger consultation about literacy and numeracy standards (here we go again).


We love the emphasis on plain English reporting, as detailed in another document from the Ministry:

From 25 May to 3 July 2009 the Ministry of Education is undertaking consultation, with the education sector, parents, family, whānau, community and iwi on the development of National Standards in literacy and numeracy (reading, writing and mathematics), and reporting to parents in plain English.[...]

The Ministry of Education is calling for proposals from individuals or organisations interested in providing services relating to the analysis and reporting of feedback received (either through the feedback forms or general submissions (in hard-copy or online)) during the consultation on National Standards in literacy and numeracy (reading, writing and mathematics) and reporting to parents in plain language.

So if you have an opinion, now’s good. Like, sentences should be shorter than 58 words?

GETS (Government Electronic Tender Service) has the document for contractors.