Plain Language – Harness the value of clear communication

Tēnā koutou katoa. Welcome to this Allen + Clarke webinar. Plain language, harnessing the power of clear communication.

My name is Jacqui Haggland and it's my pleasure to welcome you to this kōrero. I have a background in adult literacy and so this topic is something that's very dear to my heart. We have over 700 people joining us today and we want to give a warm welcome to those of you that are joining us for the first time.

It's great to have you with us. Around 45% of people dialling in, it's the first time joining us. So you may not be familiar with who Allen + Clarke are.

We are an Australasian based consultancy dedicated to making a positive impact on communities throughout Aotearoa, Australia and the Pacific. Our areas of work include strategy, governance, programme delivery, policy and regulation, evaluation and research. As an organisation, we give a damn about empowering you to overcome society's biggest challenges, which is why we regularly run these webinars, create desk guides and provide expert advice whenever we can.

In today's discussion, we've invited one of our partners, Wright, to come and share their expertise on plain language. Tēnā koe, Anne-Marie and Penny. Let's start with you, Anne-Marie.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and about Wright. Kia ora koutou. I'm Anne-Marie Chisholm and I'm the DCE at Wright.

Well, Wright's all about helping organisations get more value from the time they spend writing. We're a plain language consultancy with a team of trainers and content specialists and we believe that plain language is a powerful tool to help government in business performance. I've held a range of roles at Wright and worked on many different plain language challenges for lots of different organisations.

So I love this topic that we're discussing today about how to harness the value of clear communication. Kia ora koutou. I'm Penny Maxwell.

My background is in teaching languages, career development coaching with the Tertiary Education Commission and most recently working at Te Herenga Waka, Victoria University, translating academics' ideas into business pitches for start-up funding with KiwiNet. I'm passionate about using words for good, which is why I'm a consultant and trainer at Wright. Shall we get right into it? Yes.

What is plain language? So here's the definition of plain language from the International Plain Language Federation. The Federation has recently been working on a new ISO standard for plain language. Essentially, plain language is communication that your audience can understand the first time they read it.

You can tell that your content's in plain language if your audience can find what they need, understand what they find the first time they read it, and use what they find to help them meet their needs. I really like this definition because it recognises that different readers need different things. It's also a very functional definition.

Can I read what I'm given and am I able to take action as a result? You'll see that the definition includes not just wording, which we often think of first when we talk about plain language, but also the structure of the content and the way the content is designed. So today we will talk a little bit more about wording and structure later on. If you apply plain language techniques, this gives you more value from the time and the effort that you put into writing.

I've heard you mention before that all words have a price. Thanks, Jacqui. Yes, this is actually a really great little quote from a friend of ours at Wright.

Words do come with a price tag, even if you're not aware of it. Poor writing wastes your time and therefore it wastes money too. If you think that your organisation's writing is not always as effective as you'd like it to be, then it's time to start working out what it's costing you and to find ways to improve your return on investment.

So we'll talk a little bit more about these costs in a moment. So you've shared what we mean by plain language. Can you tell us a little bit more about how organisations and their stakeholders can benefit from efforts in plain language? Writing in plain language benefits government and businesses in several ways.

Trust. Clear and understandable communication builds trust with the audience. When the government agencies or businesses communicate in plain language, it demonstrates transparency and a commitment to clarity.

And this transparency fosters trust between the organisation and its stakeholders, whether they're citizens, customers or employees. Equity is another area. Plain language ensures that information is accessible to everyone, regardless of their literacy level or their background.

By removing jargon, complex terminology and unnecessary complexity, government agencies and businesses can reach a wider audience and promote equity. Brand loyalty is something to consider. Clear communication enhances the brand image of government agencies and businesses.

When organisations consistently provide information in plain language, they're perceived as more trustworthy, customer friendly and reliable. This positive perception can lead to increased brand loyalty as customers or citizens feel valued and respected. And efficiency.

Plain language communication can improve efficiency by reducing misunderstandings, errors and confusion. The equity point of plain language is something that came through really strongly in my adult literacy work, particularly in areas of health and financial literacy, but also in areas of policy and contracts. Not using plain language in these documents can instantly disadvantage a lot of people.

And also efficiency. It's something that we know is important to a lot of the organisations that we work with. So what does this look like in practise? A lot of businesses produce physical products.

For example, they might take raw materials, use the technology and people to make them, then send them to distributors all over the world, and finally the product gets to the customer. For organisations whose product is information or a service, we go through a similar process to produce our product. We have ideas or information, we write it down, we publish it online or on paper, and the information gets to our readers.

For a physical product, streamlining the process is important for efficiency. We can streamline the way we produce information too. The more your ideas are well captured in your writing, the more your writing process is refined.

The more your publication channel finds the right audience, and the better the transfer of information is for your reader. So what do we need to do then to optimise this process? Well, we think that you need to have a lean and efficient process so that you produce writing that's relentlessly focused on the reader. This sounds easy, but it's not.

Most people, when they're writing at work, are focused on getting their ideas out. They're not focused on, what will this piece of writing be like to receive? How can I make this better, more palatable for my reader? The people in your organisation also need to be really good at analysis and have excellent skills in critical thinking so that they can produce logical content. You need to have really carefully considered the appropriate channels for your readers to receive the information.

Would they prefer a webpage, a PDF that's emailed to them, or even a print document that's posted to them, or something that they're able to pick up from a branch office? What we're focussing on particularly today is that second point, the value of developing an organisation-wide writing process that focusses on the reader's experience, whether the reader is your end customer, your stakeholder, or the workmate who sits next to you. In the spirit of Kaizen, we create anything at work. It makes sense to think about the costs of creating that thing.

For writing, there are some consequence costs if writing is unclear. Some of these might be things like proposals that are not very persuasive, or business cases that miss the mark and aren't accepted by whoever is reading them that needs to make that decision. These can cause lost opportunities.

Unclear contracts, as you mentioned, Jacqui, that can cause legal risks. Buried messages and long emails that you send to a colleague can cause frustration, wasted time when they need to find what you need them to do. Maybe it's the minister's offices returning papers for rework.

And call centres, this is a really common one. We find that call centres are often flooded with questions when a company rolls out a new process that might involve a policy change. All right, so we're going to go to our poll.

So what we really want to hear from you today is how are you going with clear communication at your place? So we've got four options. Awesome, senior leaders are on board and everyone knows how to apply plain language principles. Good, our comms team is committed and we have some resources and training.

Okay-ish, we have editors and regular peer review and we have plans for training. Or could do better, hear together some ideas and be convinced. All right, so we've got a few seconds coming through.

Let me see how we go. Yeah, don't worry if you feel like you're number three or number four. That's typical of what we find when we go into organisations, that not everyone has it all sussed by no means.

Or you might be feeling like you're really confident about what's happening at your place. And we've also seen some fantastic examples recently, especially with the introduction of the Plain Language Act. We're finding that government agencies are really getting on board with it and they've appointed a plain language officer and those people are starting to do all sorts of wonderful things in the organisation.

Cool. So it looks like we've got pretty even actually between good, okay-ish and could do better. So, you know, I think that's quite an interesting mix.

Is that the sort of thing that you'd expect? So it does mean, however, that like 60% basically of our respondents are either at okay-ish or could do better. Yeah, I think we can show you a few tips and tricks to help those people along the way today. And further than that, we run a whole series of workshops and all kinds of different things that you can come along to.

Cool. I'd love to meet the awesome folks. Good on you.

That was great. Really pleased to see 5% of the respondents picking awesome. That's fantastic.

So when we start working with organisations, we use a model, a framework called the Rewrite for Change model that you can see on your screen. At the centre of the model, in that dark green area, is the standard. The standard means what does clear writing look like at your place? What do you mean by clear writing and how does that look in your context? If you don't have a standard already, you can use the Right to Plain Language standard, which is on our website.

You can use it under Creative Commons and just attribute right. You can change it to suit your circumstances. And we know that many of the people in the audience already have their own plain language standard, which may or may not be based on ours.

If you have a standard, this means that plain language is no longer just an abstract idea. It can be quite hard to pin it down if you don't have a standard. So that would mean that people could interpret plain language differently in different situations.

So the standard helps to define what plain language means to you and your organisation. We will talk a little bit more about the standard in a moment. On the model you can see measure.

The measure component is really important. This is where it's a good idea to start, if you're starting a culture change project or a plain language project in your organisation, you might want to measure your writing quality. What does it look like now? Let's get a baseline and see where we're starting.

And that way we can look at how things improve over time. So if we're working with an organisation, we typically start with a discovery process and an audit. We would take a sample of content from across the organisation and measure each piece of content against the components of the standard.

We also review people's processes and we might survey, staff, interview key people so that we can document where things are at now. And you can do this yourself, but we would say that it's actually beneficial to have someone external carry out this part because they're obviously going to be very objective. Training.

Training is one that people often think about. It's a great idea to train people in how to write clearly, how to write to your standard. And if we're in your organisation delivering training, we obviously tailor it to the needs of your people and the roles that they perform.

Expect. We should really talk about expect first in a way. It's really critical to get your leaders on board.

In some cases, they embrace the idea of a plain language culture straight away because they can see the benefits really clearly. And they might even propose it before anyone else has thought of it. In other cases, leaders take a little bit of convincing.

So when we work with leaders in an organisation, we do talk about culture change and we might facilitate some sessions with them. We give them the opportunity to explore the benefits of plain language in such a way that they eventually come up with the idea that changing the way we write around here is their idea. And that way they can set out the expectations for others and guide and lead the project.

Ideally, you would bake in the expectation of great writing. You put it into your business systems. So, for example, you might add a quality writing component into advertisements for vacancies, into role descriptions or KPIs.

For peer reviewers, you might give them useful checklists that they can use when they're looking at other people's work. You might set up a system for quality assurance of your publications, including web copy. I mention web copy because often web writing is devolved to many people in an organisation, so it can be a little bit harder to make sure it's consistent.

Support is the next element here. It is really critical to support people so that they can meet the standard. So an organisation will appoint some champions.

They are promoters of plain language. Under the Plain Language Act that we have now, a champion is also a bit like a plain language officer. They often have extra expertise and they can help their colleagues.

They might organise a PR campaign to keep the ideas top of mind for people. And they might look at resources and other things, making sure that the resources you provide are useful and that they're on brand. You might need to update your style guide if you have one.

Get a style guide if you don't have one. You would check the usability of your templates and other guidance documents. You review any standard text that you use frequently.

And you could give people useful examples of content that shows them what good actually looks like. Thank you. We've had a question come through from Anne, specifically relating to the measure component.

She's asked, do you have software for the measure component, or do you use a mix of your own methods? That's a really good question. We do use some software, actually. But what we've found so far is that, and this might change with AI, I would suspect, and we're working on that side of it too, that software so far can't look at some of those critical things like the purpose of the content, the structure, it's getting there with structure, but definitely things like word choice and sentence length and paragraph length and jargon and those kinds of things.

So we use software, but we also have our trained assessors who know how to apply the standard. Cool. In case of watch this space, potentially.

So a model like what you've just talked us through is great for providing the foundation for writing and presenting information, but can you share some tips that our viewers can take away with them as a place to start implementing what they've heard from you today? Absolutely. We encourage you to think, first of all, think about your reader and structure your content well and also let your headings tell the story. We're going to describe exactly how you can do all these things and give you a few examples.

Fantastic. We base our business writing content and training on the 10 elements of the plain language standard. If you apply these elements, you'll create reader focused documents.

Documents become clear so that the reader does what you ask them to do. You'll get fewer questions. Redrafting and reworking will be reduced and that helps you avoid that back and forth of all those reiterations and peer reviews.

It can go up to as many as 30, I've heard, in some organisations. After you have made the purpose of your document clear at the start, how do you make the structure of your document clear and logical to the reader? Well, we suggest you spend half your time on the plan. Investing time early in the writing process saves you time later.

And follow a logical structure. Your main messages are the important pieces of information from the reader's point of view. So put them in order that makes sense to your reader, usually from the most important to the least important.

This is based on a journalistic style of writing and you can see the inverted pyramid structure there. You can do this throughout your document. Put the main message at the start of the document itself and at the start of sections, even paragraphs, and right down to sentences.

So a good structure means your readers can glance down the page and quickly decide what they want to focus on. Planning first and applying the inverted pyramid structure will save you time later. Penny, do you think that's a bit different from the academic structure that people would probably typically be using in their writing? Absolutely.

I find that a lot. Particularly working with people working in government agencies often have academic backgrounds. You can be an expert in academic writing and an expert in business writing.

But the structures are opposite. Academic writing has introduction, body, and conclusion while in business writing you just reveal the murderer at the beginning and then you can go down to your least important information later. I think that's really important.

Things like writing any kind of document for the minister, putting the recommendations early is a hot tip. And often structures are set up exactly like that. We recommend informative headings that summarise your main messages, not just labels.

Why? Informative headings are quick and easy to scan. Your reader can easily find the point they're most interested in and read it straight away. Or find the information they need to know for their next meeting, for example.

But how do you create them? Mark Twain once said, I didn't have time to write a short letter so I wrote a long one instead. I know that feeling. Writing concisely is much harder than a lot of people realise.

Can you give us some examples of what this looks like in practise? I've actually got a couple up my sleeve, Jacqui. Even though they're different sized fonts, the text on the left is the same word count as the text on the right. But look at the one on the left, that's the original.

How does it make you feel? It's got dense text, it's quite scary. The one on the right is a rewrite in plain language. Scan the headings and you get the key messages, the messages are clear and the writing is inviting.

Or like this, again the word count is very similar between the two, but you can scan the informative headings to get the main messages and you can easily dive into the document at the place that is most relevant to you. You'll notice the bullet points are broken up by the headings, which direct the reader and help them to absorb the information more quickly. So on the left they'd done a good job of using bullet points, hadn't they? But it was a big long list of bullets.

That's right, and your brain can only process about six or seven pieces of information. So if you're presented with something like that, you just glaze over and park it to read later. I really like the second example, I think it's fantastic.

Lastly, we're going to talk about how your sentences are where the magic happens. The sentence element of the standard is sentences are mostly short and straightforward. That means one idea for each sentence and it helps the reader to absorb the information more easily.

Bonus tip, the full stop is your friend. Oh, I absolutely love that. Here's an example I found from, dare I say it, Alan and Clark.

So we've edited this 39 word sentence into three sentences, each with just one idea and we've used more familiar, straightforward language. So if you look at the one on the right, there is an acronym there for the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment. We're assuming in the context that people know that acronym.

If you didn't know that, then you definitely need to spell it out the first time you'd write it. But employment services in words is easier to understand than ES, which could mean different things to different people, different organisations, for example, education specialist or economic and social or something like that. I must say that there are a number of acronyms that are used across a number of different government departments and they all mean something different.

So, yeah, definitely acronyms have their place, but you do need to make it clear that which one you're using and it may just be easier to write it out in full. Alan and Clark kindly allowed us the permission to use this example, by the way. It's not a surprise.

And here's a great example from the Plain Language Awards, best sentence transformation. A good way to check your sentences is to say them out loud. So let's try this one.

Monitoring of the development strategy is undertaken on an annual basis to measure and report on progress toward achieving the implementation of the strategy. You lost me there, Penny. And let's be honest, it does sound a bit formal and pompous.

How would you explain it to your reader if you were talking to them? Because often if you say things out loud, you get a more straightforward sentence, don't you? If you pitch your reader, why don't you explain it to me? Yeah, absolutely. If you say it out loud, how you explain it to someone, that's more like a plain language style of writing for your documents. So this one is just we report on the development strategy every year to track its progress.

Much better, so much simpler. Write that instead. Now I am just going to have to get a bit of support from my crew because I've lost the screen with the Q&A.

Isn't it great that we have a support crew? Look, thank you both so much for the introduction to these key elements of the plain language. We've got some questions, which we're finding right now that people have sent through. Have you got anything else that you want to share with us while we wait for these questions? Did we talk about sentence length in that slide? I can't recall.

It was written on the slide. Yeah, actually a variety of sentence length makes your writing flow better. But we're really looking at chopping up those great big long sentences.

Sometimes we see 60 word sentences, 30, 40. If you can get them down to less than 20, then it makes a big difference for the reader. It's OK to have the occasional longer sentence, isn't it? But just to vary that length and not to overwhelm people with sentences that go on for a whole paragraph.

With clause after clause after clause, which is quite different to academic or legal writing as well. OK, brilliant. Thank you.

We have our questions now. So first of all, Judith, a question from Judith. What do Anne-Marie and Penny think is the role generative AI can or should play in the plain language writing process? I could start that off.

I mean, I think we see it very much as a tool at this stage to help writing. We know that some agencies and government sector are not able to use generative AI, but that's changing. I think it's inevitable that everyone will be using it.

We have seen content that's been written by AI and at the moment, mostly, you can definitely tell that it's been written by AI. And it doesn't sound like a human. So we're about the human in the writing, having it sound like the tone and the style is written by a real person.

So it's really a tool. You can use it to come up with an outline, to maybe draft some content that you then go back in and review. I think that's really important.

Yeah, it can be helpful in the planning process to help you formulate your main messages as full sentences. That can be a stage to use AI. Yeah, developing your ideas.

Getting that inspiration going, I guess. Yeah, it's a bit of inspiration, but developing your ideas, I think, should come from your brains. And it depends.

Yeah, sorry. And it is very much, I think, too, about how you prompt the AI to write. So being very careful about the prompts that you use.

And you usually find if you kind of adapt your prompts along the way, you get a better result coming out of it. But usually you will have to do quite a considerable amount of work on the content that it generates before it's suitable for publishing. And as we've just seen there, sometimes technology fails you and you need a bit of human support.

Look, we've got another question here from Kevin. And he asks about your thoughts for plain language for the neurodiverse community. Yeah, very interesting.

So one of the parts of the plain language standard is looking at your layout of your document. So we have an acronym CARPED, which goes through contrast, alignment, repetition, density. And all these elements can improve readability for neurodiverse people.

So, for example, having a high contrast of black writing on white is the best. Sometimes white on a darker background can be confusing for people. So there's that kind of thing is really important for people.

Choosing a font that works well, that is a readable, accessible font. That's quite important. I mean, essentially all the elements that work best to make writing accessible and inclusive for neurodiverse people also work well for everybody.

So it's like, let's just do the best for everybody, really. Yeah, and one thing is to try and have 50-50 white space to writing on the page. That balance is really great because it really helps you scan quickly through documents.

That's fantastic and really good points. And actually relates to another question we've got here from Amanda, where she asked about whether there's any thoughts on writing for people with English as a second language or second or other language. So she notes that her team engages with a lot of the deaf community, also for whom written English is often inaccessible or people that have it as a second language.

I think for people who have English as a second language, you have to be careful not to use idiomatic language. So idioms or like New Zealandisms, colloquialisms. And we have a lot, every language has the set of little phrases that we say, but it can be really confusing for people.

So put a filter over your writing, particularly in emails back and forth to people, because you might say, I jumped the gun there or something like that. And someone will get that and think, what's she doing, jumping over guns? You know, it sounds weird. That classic one in the New Zealand context is that bring a plate.

You know, bring a plate, whereas we mean bring some food to share, but people don't interpret it that way. And what about for deaf audience? Any ideas on that? I guess one of the things is if you're going to have it interpreted by a deaf interpreter, then you really want the content that the person is saying to be super clear and well paced. And that would include all the things that we've talked about today in terms of structure, word choice and sentence length to make sure that it's easily able to be translated by an interpreter.

That would be something that would be... Yeah, absolutely. Look, there's some fantastic things. And you're right, you know, what steps you can take to make things easier for people with English as a second language or neurodiverse or other accessibility issues, make it easier for everyone.

So I think, you know, they're just some really good principles to have in mind. So we've got another question here from Pete. He would love to know your thoughts about non-written communication.

What is the role of iconography and how do you use visual cues like bold and colour? And what role do they play in your communication? I think what Penny mentioned before about the CART principles is really relevant to this. And one of those principles, for example, is repetition. So if you're going to use an icon for something, you make sure that you use the same icon for that same thing all the way through.

And it sounds like such an obvious thing, but it doesn't always happen. Often there's a temptation to kind of jazz things up, make things look more visually interesting, but simpler is generally much, much better. So bearing in mind those principles, things like bold, we suggest using very carefully.

If you have a page of content and you see bold terms popping up, that can really distract the reader's eye. So things like that just really need to be thought through. And a really good way to make sure that they are working well for readers is to do some user testing.

So try out the content with users who represent your audience profile, if you like, and see what they say, because that's where you'll get really honest feedback and you'll be able to adapt your content to be much more usable. And I'd say save the bold for the headings. As I said earlier, we can scan through them quickly.

That's a really good place for them. And it's a lot easier to read lowercase rather than capital letters. It's much more easy.

We recognise words as chunks and the shape of the words and the block capitals just take a lot longer to process. The user testing one is a really important point. We often end up supporting organisations around consultation, like with surveys and those sorts of things.

And it's one of the steps that we always include within our survey development when we're doing that for our clients, is actually testing them out with some fresh eyes. You know, does this make sense? Does it flow? How easy is that question? Is what you're asking in that question actually what you mean to be asking? Is that going to elicit the information that you're trying to get from it? Yeah, and that's a really key point. So we've got a couple more questions.

I love this one from Mary. Any tips for how to make PowerPoint interesting and not kill people with boredom? Don't have too many slides. Yeah, true confession.

We had, what was it, 50 slides? We had to cut them in half. We were going to flip through them quite quickly. Yeah, we call it death by PowerPoint.

And yeah, I think it can be quite hard if you are doing presentations. It's quite a good idea to have slides on and then be able to turn them off and just talk with people, because otherwise everyone's eyes are a bit jittery from looking at the sort of luminescence on the screen as well. That's something to think about.

Very good. And so Arnold has got a question here. Any thoughts on limit of use of punctuation, such as commas and sentences and full stops and bullets? Oh, that's interesting.

That's an interesting thought. Yes, a lot of your organisations will have a writing style guide. What I've noticed in delivering some workshops is that a lot of people don't even know about them.

So it would be great to just see if your organisation does have a writing style guide, and that goes through your organisation's style of punctuation. So you might have specific list styles. Basically the semicolon is a thing of the past, and one thing to note is that punctuation goes in trends and it changes.

And the reduction in punctuation, like semicolons, is a trend, but it makes it simpler and easier to follow because it just adds to decluttering your writing. Do you mean in bulleted lists, for example? Yes, having it at the end of each bullet point. Yes, I agree.

Much cleaner style not to have that punctuation. We've moved away from having the semicolon at the end of the bullet points in the last few years, and I agree, definitely a much cleaner style. Now Lachlan's got a question here, and I don't know whether this is one that you can answer, but we'll give it a try.

So he's asked whether there's a reason why some government departments use advisor with O-R and some use advisor with E-R. Do you know, we had to decide on that for us. We had to decide what is our style going to be, and we went with E-R.

And I actually disagreed with that choice. To me it made sense to go advisor, advisory, so it felt to me like they fitted together. I'm not sure if there's a rule about it, or whether one goes with US English and one goes with UK English.

No, I think they're both in the dictionary. So I guess the point is, once you make a decision about which one you're going to use, then use it consistently. Yeah, consistency builds trust.

So if you saw advisor, advisor throughout a document, you'd feel a bit confused. You might think that different people had written the content, which might well be true, but it's a great idea to go through and make sure everything is aligned. Unfortunately we've run out of time to answer all of your questions, but please do feel free to reach out and contact us via our website.

But just before we wrap up today, I'm really keen to hear from Penny and Anne-Marie. What are your final thoughts that you want our viewers to take away with them today? Well, some people wrote their plain language challenge was how to incorporate technical writing into plain language. And we have a few tips for that.

One thing is, do you need the technical language at all? So think carefully. Can I say it in a plainer way, a more familiar way? As if I'm talking to someone and explaining it to them. So that's one way of untangling yourself from technical terms.

If you need to have them in there, you could write them in plain language and then have them in brackets. Another thing you can do is, if it's a big technical project, just refer back to it as the project throughout the document. And that works for a lot of acronym heavy documents as well.

Always think of who the audience is. If they're technical people who know the technical language in your organisation, you can use that language. But if it's going further or out to the public, then you need to carefully consider how you weave the technical language into the text.

That's fantastic. Thank you, Penny. And Anne-Marie, anything from you? I was going to pick verbs actually, direct verbs, using direct and active verbs, as we saw in that example from the Plain Language Awards.

The way to make that sentence really simple and straightforward was to uncover the verbs and to use we and you. So say who is doing what and for whom. That's fantastic.

Nice, clear and really simple. Thank you both so much for your presentation today. And ngā mihi to all of you for dialling in today and really hope that you've enjoyed the conversation, enjoyed the korero and got something useful from it.

Thank you very much.