Building Rapport

Plain language, then and now
By Cheryl Stephens

In the 17th century Latin and French dominated England’s royal court and law courts, while the working people in the streets were demanding plain old English. Plain language remains a democratic demand and a civil right into the 21st century.
Australian Robert Eagleson was touring Canada, when I first heard of plain language.

In 1989 he shared his experiences as a professor of English and a consultant to law firms and government with the Canadian plain language movement. Clarity, an international association of lawyers favoring plain legal language, was already promoting clear legal writing from it base in England under the leadership of solicitor Mark Adler.

With Kate Harrison Whiteside, I founded what is now the Plain Language Association InterNational (PLAIN) in 1993. It is now one for the groups leading the international movement along with Clarity and the Washington.DC-based Center for Plain Language.

Leading from the heart at the Center is Annetta Cheek, a veteran of 25 years with the U.S. government. Annetta was the key lobbyist in getting the US Plain Writing Act passed in 2010. From the anniversary on October 13, U.S. government staff must write plainly all forms and information concerning public benefits and services.

This major accomplishment has inspired plain language proponents all over the world to renewed efforts. It was this that led me to persuade Kate Harrison Whiteside that we have an opportunity to celebrate the accomplishments of the last 30 years in providing clear understandings to our publics.

So Kate and I declared October 13, 2011 the first annual International Plain Language Day. This late inspiration gave us only weeks to organize but the Internet has brought both a greater demand for plain language and the tools to organize quickly. Many activities will take place in several countries.

Individuals like Mark, Robert, Annetta, Kate, and I, who are passionate about the issue, have kept the movement alive even when changes in political regimes cancelled projects and institutions. I thank them for their pioneering activism and camaraderie in the early days of our movement.

I am proud that the Mayor of Vancouver has proclaimed October 13 International Plain Language Day for my city. I encourage others to start now to get a proclamation from their own city next year.

No event in your area? Here is how to spend your day October 13

• Sleep late.
• Read a newspaper with your cup of coffee. Use a red pen to circle tired, trite phrases, mixed metaphors, bafflegab, and other writing offences. Submit those to the collection on LinkedIn.com/PlainLanguageAdvocates.
• Phone the paper’s editorial offices and advise them to use plain language.
• Send a message to a friend; review it and rewrite those parts that could be misunderstood.
• Send another message, to many friends, and ask them to join the largest, international network of Plain Language Advocates, a LinkedIn group.
• Select an important piece from your morning mail: a consumer contract, a bank statement, a credit card statement, something from an insurance agency or car rental company, or local gym, and actually read every word of it. Call the company and ask them to explain the meaning of each sentence that is not clear and the circumstances under which each sentence would be used.
• Take time for lunch!
• Call your local continuing education program and ask if they have a course in plain language.
• If anybody asks, tell them: Plain language is clear, straightforward expression, using only as many words as are necessary… It is not baby talk, nor is it a simplified version of the language. (Robert Eagleson)
• Post your experiences on Twitter with the hashtag #iplday
• Order a plain language writing guide online.
• Check the procedures online and get the scoop on how to have your mayor proclaim next October 13 as International Plain Language Day. Make a note on your calendar to do it.
• Have a nap–it has been a long day.

This is the 4th is a series of posts questioning the current challenge of applying cognitive fluency to plain language writing.

I introduced earlier a paper written to summarize the current situation and discuss cognitive fluency applied to legal writing. And the Winner Is: How Principles of Cognitive Science Resolve the Plain Language Debate Julie A. Baker Associate Professor of Legal Writing, Suffolk University Law School Social Science Research Network: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1915300

I will summarize now what I quoted last week and add my personal opinions. In my next post, I will begin to tackle the principles of cognitive fluency.

The classical approach to persuasion set the communication pattern as a triad of audience-purpose-message and this paradigm was being taught to us when I started in plain language in 1989. According to Baker’s construction of history this was replaced by the new rhetoric. The new rhetoric saw writing as a conversation between the writer and the reader. She says the new rhetoric focused on brevity and clarity to improve reader comprehension.

Baker also sets out five theses she claims were incorporated from classical rhetoric into the new rhetoric:

(1)   Writing is recursive rather than linear.

(2)   Writing is rhetorically-based.

(3)   Writing is evaluated according to how well it serves the writer’s intent.

(4)   Writing is a creative activity that can be analyzed, described, and taught.

(5)   Teaching writing is well-served by linguistic research and research into the composing process.

Nowhere in her list do we find the reader. Baker says the new rhetoric evolved to become the platform for plain language. And the plain language movement introduced the concern for making writing understandable for the reader.  It seems obvious to plain language writers that a conversation needs 2 participants.

In general, I can accept her vision of an evolution from the earliest communication triad to the current plain language approach. Through discussions with others in plain language, I believe we now need redefine our plain language paradigm to describe how we seek to align the purposes of both writer and reader and to merge their challenges and constraints in order to ensure a clear and mutual understanding of their conversation.

I am, however, concerned that insisting on using evaluation methods to ensure understanding should not be the end of the argument about what plain language is. In the last 30 years, there has been much scientific discovery that can tell us what will make our writing easy to understand. It will enlighten us about reader’s cognitive patterns and needs. It will also help us to modify writing to suit specific purposes: learning, remembering, analyzing, problem-solving, decision-making, and judgment. The application of the current learning is a challenge to us. Taking the research further and applying it to writing is a challenge for neuroscientists and cognitive psychology, but I think we need to bring this to their attention.

When a law is in place penalizing people for not writing to be understood, shouldn’t we learn what science can tell us about how people understand?

This is the third in a series of posts in which I am asking readers to express their views on the application of cognitive psychology to plain language practices. See Part One and Part Two.

As promised, I will introduce you to this article today:

And the Winner Is: How Principles of Cognitive Science Resolve the Plain Language Debate
by Julie A. Baker Associate Professor of Legal Writing, Suffolk University Law School

by means of a summary. But first, I know this article is not easy reading, but rather than criticize Baker’s legal style, let’s search it for the usable ideas.

I will give  3 reasons why I think you should read the full article:

1. Baker summarizes the history of the genre of legal writing through these forms:
   • traditional style,
   • New Rhetoric,
   • Plain Language as a consumer movement, and
   • new efforts to adopt the scientific learning acquired though neuroscience and cognitive psychology.
2. Baker concludes that we can and ought to modulate our writing style within a single document to move between
   • a. pleasing readers and making some information easy for them to process with the simplest method our brains employ
   • b. challenging readers to engage in logical analysis when needed for our purpose.
3. Hers is the first article I have found that applies the concept of fluency in a practical way to a specific writing genre.

Moderating Fluency

The main point I want you to consider is Baker’s conclusion that, examined through the lens of cognitive fluency, the competing approaches to legal writing are not mutually exclusive, but should be viewed more like “endpoints” on the spectrum of language available to the writer. Knowing this, an effective writer is can achieve credibility and persuasive force through deliberate, conscious choice of language from across this spectrum of complexity and clarity.

[Using] fluency principles going forward

Recent cognitive studies have shown that while more fluent words are easier and more familiar, they are also less stimulating, and cause our brains to engage much less when processing them. Less fluent communications, on the other hand, require the brain to engage in more complex processing – which also means processing that is more careful and, often, more interesting.

Less fluent communications have been found to heighten risk perception among readers, too. Thus, skillful legal writers should actually be able to choose the level at which they cause their readers to engage by choosing the level of fluency that they employ – always taking care to make their writing neither too simplistic, nor so complicated that the reader gets frustrated and simply gives up…
“Cognitive Fluency…is a key indicator not only of whether and how people understand information, but also of people’s judgments regarding that information. In other words, the more “fluent” a piece of written information is, the better a reader will understand it, and the better he or she will like, trust and believe it.”

Along the way to reaching this conclusion, Baker describes earlier approaches (as she sees them):

New Rhetoric
“New Rhetoric” attempted to solve these deficiencies by considering not only the finished form, but the process as well. This new rhetoric acknowledged that legal writing was a conversation between the writer and the reader. Most notably, the new rhetoric paradigm focused on brevity and clarity throughout the writing process to improve reader comprehension. The new rhetoric method applied the five basic theses of classical rhetoric to legal writing pedagogy:

(1) that writing is recursive rather than linear;
(2) that writing is rhetorically based;
(3) that the written product is evaluated based on how well it fulfills the writer’s intent;
(4) that writing is a creative activity that can be analyzed, described, and taught; and
(5) that the teaching of writing is well-served by linguistic research and research into the composing process.

The Plain Language Approach
The ideas supporting new rhetoric evolved to become the platform for plain language. Advocates for the new plain language approach theorized that the effective conversation sought by the proponents of new rhetoric could not be achieved until the language it was conducted in was intelligible to the reader. If the objectives of legal writing were to be clear, simple, and persuasive, then writing in plain language was the best way to further those objectives.
Plain language is more than just writing in simple terms and striving for brevity… Writers employing plain language plan, design, and organize their documents in an overall effort to achieve clear communication with the reader. Plain language writers also use straightforward sentences and simple words, so that the writing does not interfere with the goals of communication and comprehension.
This, too, is important for the legal writer to understand — because the possibility exists to consciously elicit varying levels of fluency in order to trigger a particular type of reasoning.

This paper can be downloaded without charge from the Social Science Research Network:
http://ssrn.com/abstract=1915300

Read for International Literacy Day

Literacy Facts: How low literacy affects people

Complete set of fact sheets from PoliceABC

Administrative Tribunals Consider Literacy

Information posters on literacy

• For Canada: The literacy problem; how literacy is measured; the statistics
• For Canada: How low literacy can block access to justice; who is affected
• For Canada: Serving a public with low-literacy skills; signals of low literacy

I wanted to show you this bit from a Newsweek article as a good example of how you can blend definitions into the text. But now, I can’t resist suggesting that it would be improved by some sculpting of the information. The second sentence is 45 words and the length contributes to making it a tough read. Sculpting reduces the cognitive load of the number of words.

What do you think?

“At least five large, randomized controlled studies have analyzed treatments for stable heart patients who have nothing worse than mild chest pain.

The studies compared invasive procedures including angioplasty, in which a surgeon mechanically widens a blocked blood vessel by crushing the fatty deposits called plaques; stenting, or propping open a vessel with wire mesh; and bypass surgery, grafting a new blood vessel onto a blocked one.”

Here is the second sentence after a rework.

The studies compared invasive procedures, including:

• angioplasty

in which a surgeon mechanically widens a blocked blood vessel by crushing the fatty deposits called plaques

• stenting

propping open a vessel with wire mesh

• bypass surgery

grafting a new blood vessel onto a blocked one.

Are you, like me, wondering what to do to mark International Plain Language Day coming up this October 13?

Event-planning and Idea-sharing Chats Online

I’m sharing ideas. Please share your ideas in the comments or join the chats online.

Organize a friendly competition

Plain Language Bee

Organize this as a team competition or like a traditional spelling bee. Pick some esoteric terms-perhaps related to your industry—and see who can offer good plain language replacements quickly.

Design crossword puzzles using esoteric words as clues and plain language answers in your puzzle.

Rewrite an existing song as a plain language anthem

Have groups perform the results. Offer a prize to the person or team who does the best job of it.

Sponsor an art contest on the theme of clarity

Reconceptualize Jargon

Take some jargon words and get people to reconceptualize them so you can never use them again without laughing. Dorrie Ratzlaff did so with these Bathetic Words. Bathetic Words

Start a Plain Klingon Movement

My favorite idea by far.

“You never merely write.  You write to someone.”

Henry Weihofen, in Legal Writing Style

Read a mature (2008)  essay and review of books on plain language called Clarity & Plain Language by Peter Stoyko.

Several books are reviewed. The quote from Blamires may have come from his Penguin Guide to Plain English rather than the book referred to, which is now only available for Kindle.

Compose Yourself and Write Good English

Of course, we would also like you to read Plain Language in Plain English from Plain Language Wizardry.