We made some fundamental assumptions about what we needed to succeed in making plain language part of the Commission's culture. All staff must receive training, regardless of their role or job description. Any training must include personal feedback and assessment of individual writing samples. Employees submitted samples that include a description of their job in their own words and some examples of work-related writing. Where employees were hard-pressed to provide work samples, we allowed them to chose other examples of their writing.

Another assumption we made is that peer review was an essential part of the process. The second day was devoted to employees breaking up into small groups of three and four to discuss their respective writing examples. Peer review is a feature we have included in our ongoing support of plain language through what we call our plain language mentoring program. We'll talk about that later.