Um, actually Denis, you're not alone in terms of being a writer and trying to make sense of all this. I'd like to offer a resource to anybody out there wanting to know what do we mean by plain language or how do we do plain language. It's the Web site of the Association, it's Plain Language Association International, and I'll give you the, it's www.plainlanguagenetwork.org. The acronym for our association is PLAIN, and there are resources from lots of different industries including law and a lot of how-to guides about how to do plain language, and I'd recommend for anybody to take a peek at that, because it really gives you a sense of how broad the movement is becoming. In fact one of our guests this weekend was encouraging us not to use the word "movement" any longer, because what we're trying to say now is that this is something that should just be established. It's not just something to strive for anymore because there are enough of us out there that do it.

The other thing I would say about writing is that, when we think about writing we often think about the creative part of writing, or the persuasive part of writing. And again, a lot of that has to do with writing to impress rather than writing to inform. I wanted to make that distinction, because people who are writing creatively, who use flowery words and all that--there is a perfectly good group of contexts for that, so we're not saying that you should, you know, strip the language down to something that is really dry and not expressive and not colourful. But it really again just depends on the context of the user, and a lot of us in school these days--a couple of years ago I taught a class, first-year college--and it was amazing. I understand that grammar teaching in school nowadays is not what it once was, and so people are coming out not even really feeling comfortable with just basic grammar and sentence structure, and you know learning plain language rules and grasping the rules of grammar makes it a lot easier to not fall into that trap of feeling like we need to inflate everything.

M-hmmn. Denis thank you for your call. Paul phoning from somewhere on the 401. Hi Paul!

Good afternoon.

Yes, who needs a lesson in plain language?

Well I'm looking at it in the reverse. Your guest mentioned a moment ago that she doesn't want to use the language get towards being dry, and lacking colour. Yet in point of fact the English language can be an art form, and I'm concerned that by making it plain, it's a form of dumbing down. The fact that someone that's in university exhibits the ability to express themselves in verbiage and uses terms such as "obfuscation" etcetera etcetera, and that being wrong, I would like to think that instead of going the other way so we don't challenge our people too badly, verbally, that we're doing the opposite--we're saying "Let's make it simpler so that they can understand it." I think we're going the wrong way.

I think it depends on the context, Paul.