Here are some examples of how plain language can benefit organisations.

The 'Blue Book'
The original 750,000-word Force Instruction Book was reduced to just 60,000 words. The new plain English Blue Book was so successful that police forces from as far afield as the USA and Australia have asked if they could use this book as a model for their own force instruction books.

Rank Xerox leases
Rank Xerox, Europe's second largest supplier of photocopiers and computer printers, asked us to work with their legal team to revise all their rental, service, and maintenance contracts.

By the time we had finished the revisions, we had a set of contracts their customers found much easier to understand. Instead of each contract running to 2000 words, they were now down to just 200 words.

Aircraft lease contract
British Aerospace asked us to work with their legal advisers, Clifford Chance and Allen & Overy, two of the world's biggest law firms, to create a plain English version of their cross-border leasing contract.

By the time the final version had been approved by the Campaign, it had been reduced to just 50 pages including guarantees, credit letters and leasing amendments ~ a third of the length of the original lease.

The new lease has had some spectacular results. One of the first transactions done using the new lease was for six Airbus A320 aircraft. Normally, such a deal would take six months to complete. But with the new lease, the US$180 million deal was completed in just three and a half weeks.

There are now many plain language groups around the world working in a number of different languages. It seems that English is not the only language which can be twisted and mangled by bureaucrats! French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Hindi can be made impenetrable if writers choose to make it so.

We try to make writers aware that the people they are trying to communicate with will probably have much poorer literacy skills than themselves. If their aim is to inform people rather than just trying to impress them, they need to use a clear style of language and design.

Francis Bacon said 'Knowledge itself is power' and Plain English Campaign is in the business of empowering ordinary people by making sure that they have access to that knowledge.

That concludes our presentation. If you would like to learn more about the Campaign, we have a website at www.plainenglish.co.uk. This contains a lot of useful information and free publications which you can download, as well as an e-mail contact point.