Building Rapport

What is the value of plain language? Part 2

Don’t expect me to wax philosophic. I am not taking this up as a deep subject. This is practical. We plain language professionals want to be reasonable but we don’t want to be exploited for our naiveté. But some clients are clueless about how much effort goes into plain language. They undervalue our results.

Years ago, a friend did a revision and reduction of a 14-page standard form. She billed $10,000 for 3 month’s work. In the year that followed, the company saved $100,000 in printing costs due to the new form. But when asked to fund the second stage of the project, the company declined. I’d say the value of plain language was 10 times its cost. And they passed.

Let me give you a personal example. Another friend, a lawyer, was asked to comment on a draft plain-language description of procedures in his agency. Members of the public, who would be in distress, were the intended readers. He asked me to do a better rewrite. He would pay me himself and take credit.

I worked on it at an hourly rate and billed him fairly for $1000.

It turned out the agency has a plain language explanation of its new legislation on its website. But the draft procedures used different terminology for the same things. I knew enough from my previous experience to look for that.

The agency was pleased with “his” effort and gave him an honorarium of $250.00. which in no way represented the effort at HIS hourly rate.

I don’t know what we can do to make clients appreciate our value.

I try to inform individual clients what I do for them. I have always included in a proposal an outline of the steps I will need to take. When working on a project, I always provide a work plan and schedule to the client at the start.

What do you suggest?

I am not going to write here about the benefits of using plain language, which include costs savings and other bottom-line advantages. My complaint here is about those clients who do not understand how much time and effort we expend to transform their drab, wordy documents into plain language. First, I have to discuss what is actually involved.

South African Dr Sarah Slabbert, of the Plain Language Institute, has said:

“Editing or translation: First of all, the ‘linguistically complex document’, i.e. the document that needs to be converted into plain language, is rewritten or translated into plain language. During this phase, the document is analysed and the linguistic structure of the document is simplified, while taking care that the meaning is not distorted. Formal words are substituted with less formal words; for example, ‘accomplish’ will be replaced with ‘do’”

Quoted at http://www.enterpriserisk.co.za/forum/topics/what-is-plain-language-and-why

This may be what most general editors think should happen first. Plain Language is more than an editing job following the guidelines seen here and there. Maybe she incorporates this (below) when she says the document is analyzed.

Here: PlainLanguage.gov http://www.plainlanguage.gov/howto/guidelines/bigdoc/fullbigdoc.pdf

There:
• using short sentences and clear language
• using words consistently
• using the active voice
• avoiding strings of synonyms
• avoiding unnecessarily formal language
• replacing “legalese” and jargon with familiar terms and phrases

The PlainLanguage.Gov site does remind its users that plain language involves organization and design as well as language. But something is still missing from the early stage. Guidelines are fine as they are, but mine are more like these Writing Guidelines: http://plainlanguage.com/newintro.html#guide

What is in the magic?

I do have a recurring client who gets it. They send me a document and ask me to do my “magic.” Other people can do the magic. Writer or editor, you must know the readers well. Some understand their readers’ needs because they work with the same demographic repeatedly. The rest of us have to do the research to get to know the reader.

My own client does know their readers well. This client often hires academic experts to tell them what they need to teach their readers. The academics usually produce a thorough report using academic language, both jargon and necessary technical language.

So I get the document and do the magic so the information is understandable and usable by a group of readers, like one of these:

1. Women whose families are new immigrants to Canada from war-torn countries, whose first language is not English,
2. Aboriginal women, on reserve or in urban environments
3. Parents, with limited education, living in rural or isolated Northern areas of Canada

After doing the necessary reader research, the plain language editor must try to see the information through the eyes of the ultimate reader.

These days we try to ignore differences between ourselves and others, so we do not discriminate from prejudice. Plain language editors must acknowledge differences between people to benefit from seeing the world from the other person’s perspective.

Good clients understand the making information understandable requires more than editing. Being able to see the world differently, that is the magic.

Now, I will be talking dollar values in the next part of this article.

I just received an email solicitation from a business that I have allowed to send me these. I read it and thought my mind had wondered in 3 short lines because I was in a fog.
Here is the only full sentence:

Do you need a 1-Day priority support, an early access to betas and forthcoming features, goodies and a VIP status with guaranteed commitment to your organization on any dashboarding project?

The words are not that strange, so what is the problem. The only word that might be considered jargon these days is dashboarding. Beta might be inappropriate for a message to the general public, but I won’t complain about it here. So I ran the sentence through the test at Check Test Readability, just as a first-stage filter.

So what is the problem or problems?

The sentence has 31 words (a few too many even for skilled readers) with an average of 1.77 syllables per word (pretty good by that measure alone). The sentence scores 25.30 out of 100 on the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease scale. The text score indicates the is not clear and easy reading–confirming my personal experience.

These are the other results:

Readability Formula U.S Grade Level

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level 17.40

Gunning-Fog Score 20.10

Coleman-Liau Index 13.80

SMOG Index 14.10

Automated Readability Index 17.80

Average Grade Level 16.64

Break up the sentence

I quickly broke the sentence apart and made a list. Like this:

Do you need help and a VIP status on any dashboarding project?

You get our guaranteed commitment to your organization with:

• 1-Day priority support,
• early access to betas and forthcoming features, and
• other goodies.

Readability Formula U.S. Grade Level

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level 11.50

Gunning-Fog Score 13.90

Coleman-Liau Index 13.50

SMOG Index 10.10

Automated Readability Index 10.70

Average Grade Level 11.94

The tool reported that this text

1. gets a 44 on the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease scale (better, maybe not good enough)
2. contains 2 sentences, with 35 words (17.50 per sentence)
3. no change in syllables per word.

Tackling vocabulary

So I changed it a little more. Google, on an out-of-date link, defines dashboarding: Presentation of data through graphical interfaces modeled ad hoc. Not a quick and easy substitution, so let’s try social media and real-time Web.

My third attempt was:

Do you need help on any social media or real-time Web project?

You get VIP service and our guaranteed commitment to your organization with:

- one-day priority support
- early access to new features or versions
- other goodies.

These changes offer a little improvement. The Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease score is now 51.70 and the average words per sentence is 19.

Readability Formula U.S. Grade Level
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level  10.80
Gunning-Fog Score  12.90
Coleman-Liau Index  11.60
SMOG Index   9.20
Automated Readability Index (Wikipedia) 10.00
Average Grade Level 10.90

We could go further and even try this version out on a few readers, but for now I am satisfied with about a 50% reduction in confusion.

I inherited a tattered cookbook from my grandmother, a Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook from 1950. When I turned to it for a carrot cake recipe, there was none. So I checked for one in a 1990s cookbook I inherited from my father. This book started off the entry with, “Carrot cake is as American as apple pie”. Wow, what a big cultural change in a short period of time.

It seemed to me a more rapid adoption than the slow change in language to gender-free titles or the adoption of the use of the singular they pronoun.

Take the Rainbow

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, I enjoyed have out-of-town visitors to show around my city. I used those opportunities to visit a little shop that sold only rainbow items. The emotional connection that rainbows evinced at that time was joy.

The native peoples of the Andes had a different association which was expressed by using a rainbow of colors in their national symbol, the Wiphala, which is used as a square flag.

Some of these are made up of 7 bars of color while others are 7 x7 squares with the colors running diagonally. Some of their people want to avoid creating confusion in their international diplomacy about their flag’s meaning by adopting the diagonal format generally. See Wikipedia.

You know why, right?
There is now a mental association between gay and rainbow.

The rainbow may now become a symbol for the struggle for equal human rights. Anyway, as writers, editors, and designers, we need to check out the current interpretations of symbols we choose to use in communicating meaning.

Investigate Change in Meanings
To investigate new words that don’t even appear in a dictionary, I use UrbanDictionary.com. Rainbow has 57 new associations.

I was hoping I could find a visual thesaurus or visual dictionary that would be of assistance in this quest but I have not so far. They seem concerned with word labels not psychosocial meanings. For example:

Visible light Electromagnetic radiation that is perceived by the human eye and ranges from red to violet.

So, do check on alternative uses of the words and symbols you choose–to make sure you will communicate effectively.

Language-Change Index

Oxford University Press reports that the third edition of Garner’s Modern American Usage has a most interesting new feature: the Language-Change Index categorizes the level of acceptance of changes in adoption of new usages for words or phrases.

Five stages of language change

Stage 1 – rejected except by a minority of the language experts

Stage 2 – rejected by those who insist on “standard usage” but spreading fast

Stage 3 – used widely, even among the well-educated, but still avoided by the language mavens

Stage 4 – ubiquitous, meaning virtually universal, but still argued against by grammar police

Stage 5 – fully accepted by rational people

Evolving English

For another perspective on changing usage, we can turn to Robert Levy’s blog Save the Semicolon:

The Six Stages of Word Grief http://savethesemicolon.com/2010/05/11/the-six-stages-of-word-grief/
You will have to read his post for the explanations.

The Six Stages of Word Grief

1. Confusion

2. Amusement

3. Annoyance

4. Exasperation

5. Acceptance when OTHER people do it

6. Complete Acceptance or death

And, in “Very Unique” is Here to Stay, http://savethesemicolon.com/2007/07/29/unique-and-monique/

Robert says:

I think that there are at least two phases after a word becomes well-known, but before it becomes really standard.

The first is when people who care about these things (and even people who don’t, but who consider themselves educated) would never use it that way, and in fact, they sort of judge people who do use it. They roll eyes, or cringe a bit, or get annoyed when they hear role-models (like politicians) use it. They consider the usage a pet-peeve, or laughable.

The second is when the people who care about these things would still not use the word, but they accept that even educated, intelligent, well-read people do use it the new way. They start to feel curmudgeonly, or pedantic, if they insist that others avoid the new usage. They recognize that they’re on the way out.

So, for my call to action: Pick the stage with which you are comfortable, write there, and stop your belly-aching.

So-named because they are examples of zealous over-editing, whiz deletions happen when the editor strikes out the relative pronouns which and that.

Dominique Joseph has commented on these elsewhere:

As a Francophone and a translator, I can confirm that keeping the “whiz” words in makes the text clearer and easier to understand. When “whiz” words are deleted, it can be tricky to figure out the underlying structure of the sentence and the relationships between words or ideas.

1. From “Rules for writing plain English”, by Bill Lutz (http://www.plainlanguagenetwork.org/Resources/lutz.htm#anchor)

Bill Lutz says we should avoid “whiz deleletions”, which he explains as follows:

Subordinate clauses are often introduced by such words as “which is,” “who was,” “that are,” etc. Deleting these words (the relative pronoun and linking verb) is known as “whiz-deletion.” For example:

1.The supervisor wants the report which was written by the Purchasing Office.
With a whiz-deletion we get:

2.The supervisor wants the report written by the Purchasing Office.
The whiz-deletion makes sentence 2 ambiguous. Does the supervisor want the Purchasing Office to write the report, or does she want the report that the Purchasing Office has already written? Generally, it’s a good idea to avoid whiz-deletions.

(source: http://www.plainlanguagenetwork.org/Resources/lutz.htm#anchor)

2. From “Revisiting Plain Language”, by Beth Mazur (http://www.plainlanguage.gov/whatisPL/history/mazur.cfm)

One such guideline is the suggestion to “avoid whiz deletions.” A whiz deletion is the absence of introductory text for subordinate clauses. The Guidelines offer the comparison between the sentence “The director wants the report which was written by the Home Office.” and “The director wants the report written by the Home Office” (Felker and others 1981, pp. 39-40). This guideline was based on direct research done by Charrow and Charrow (1978). In their extensive study of jury instructions, these authors found that whiz deletions made jury instructions harder to understand (Felker and others 1981).

I want to hear from you: tell me what is right or wrong with this advertisement. This not a test. I am interested to hear from people with differing perspectives or focuses.

HST ad in daily newspaper

Well, lucky for me that Seth Godin blogged about writing this week and gave me my inspiration. Here is his full post:

Sort of, just and Donald Trump

I noticed a little while ago that I was using the word “just” and the phrase “sort of” in my writing. All the time, in fact. In my last book, a search and replace removed more than 80 unnecessary ‘justs’.

Just say it.

Don’t hide behind waffling terms that don’t mean anything.

On the other hand, as I passed the skating rink in New York with the Donald’s name plastered all over it, I’m reminded of a new trend I’m seeing more of, which is the act of declaring whatever you’re working on ‘the best ever,’ ‘the best in the world,’ etc.

Saying it doesn’t make it so. In fact, it probably makes it unso.

Take the advice and cut out those extra words. Not just the waffling words but the insistent words like “very” as in “It was a very long time since he had called”.

In fact, you should be able to go through your writing and cut it by at least 10%. When I edit the work of wordy professionals like lawyers, bureaucrats, and academics, I set myself a goal of reducing the word count by 30%.