Now - you may be wondering- Gregorian chants for a plain language conference? Yes! Because Gregory the Great championed reform and what was referred to as plainsong. Chants belonged to the people, not just to the professionals. Some of this early liturgical music shone with stylistic simplicity 1600 years ago!

And we have gathered here as in a pilgrimage. Our movement has that evangelical cast and I believe we need not be ashamed to proselytize. For plain language takes a stand: it advocates clarity, honesty, integrity, transparency and courtesy to readers.

For the next few minutes, I want to explore the international and interdisciplinary dimensions of our specialty, plain language. To do so, I will report on our plain language global pilgrimage, a secular pilgrimage, of course.

Our trip flowed in the wake of that ancient plainsong from 600 A.D. and, for our text, we took along an ancient book, The Pilgrim's Progress.

I need to give you two contexts before we look at examples, however. The first one comes from Henry Fowler.

About a hundred years ago, that great warden of English, author of Fowler's Modern English Usage, was engaged in the perennial problem, prepositions at the ends of sentences. Fowler was particularly irritated by a London Times writer who wrote: "A sentence ending with a preposition is an ineloquent sentence".