Plain Writing and the Act of 2010
by Jonathan Clark on May 10, 2011 at 5:39 pm
Everyone is talking “Plain Writing” these days. It comes from a federal mandate (a Congressional law, actually, The Plain Writing Act of 2010) requiring government writers to use a language the rest of us can understand!
This concept is not new, but the law itself is. The prolonged budget battle in Congress this year created havoc with the dates of compliance issues. Now people are looking around and saying, “What do we do now?”
First, a simple explanation of what it means. Wikipedia does it pretty well: A generic term for communication styles that emphasize clarity, brevity, and the avoidance of (they could have said “avoiding”) technical language–particularly in relation to official government communication, including laws. The intention is to write in a way that is easily understood by the target audience: appropriate to their reading skills and knowledge, clear and direct, free of cliche or unnecessary jargon.”
The Congressional Research Service, a non-partisan arm of the Library of Congress, took its shot at explaining the law. They did it with a 14-line paragraph averaging 43.5 words per sentence (anyone care to diagram those puppies?), containing 25 pecent passive voice, and with a reading grade level of nearly 14.
Oops.
The regulation itself requires upper-level management monitoring of the process, communicating its requirements to government employees, offering them training, establishing a compliance system, informing the public on the agency web site (accessible from the home page), and designating a contact person to receive comments from the public. Further, all of this must be in place in “every document” one year from the law’s passage.
I have been teaching Plain Writing all these years, it appears. I have always encouraged people to write simply, using words their readers know and understand, using a conversational style and active voice. Business Writing Solutions is, as it turns out, Plain Writing Solutions.
I offer this as my Solution to the agencies which must comply. But I will go the entire challenge one or two better. I will also teach them a writing process that works–that produces results, and makes the entire writing effort take 30 percent less time than it did before. That’s a productivity boost people can take directly to their bottom lines.
Do we need to talk?
