Ah. Let me see... hmm, a lot of the stuff that I've been working on has been in consumer information, so here's one maybe. I've got a before and after so I'll read the before:

"Of particular importance to those seeking opportunities for fraud, seniors are much more likely to have developed chronic ailments. Not surprisingly then, seniors are particularly concerned about their health. This concern creates a large vulnerability to quack, miracle cure, hospital fraud, aging cure and other medical fraud of all kind."

Well I don't know, I think my example was the more... [guffaws]

Well

But yeah, I understand, and that was aimed at whom?

Well that's the problem, um the problem with this one is it's reasonably clear, though it has a lot of clauses, but it's aimed at the consumers themselves, the seniors who are likely to have been defrauded, and even if I just read the first line of the After:

"If you have health concerns then you are a prime target for con artists." Period. And then it goes on to say how that can happen. So, it immediately states the purpose from the beginning, and also talks directly to the people that are being affected.

Yeah. So it's still out there, and in fact you just served as co-chair of an international plain language conference in Toronto. What goes on at an event like that?

[laughs] Well, um, this particular conference we saw as wanting to broaden the plain language movement, so what traditionally has gone on is that there are people who have identified themselves as plain language writers. For example, um, the legal tradition has a long, not only a long history of writing stuff that people say is notoriously not easy to understand, but also of trying to look at the ways the laws and judgements are written and how that goes to the consumer eventually, and what it would be possible for them to understand. Um, there are a lot of people in health who do this kind of writing as well, and others sort of in little pockets all over the world.

But what we tried to do with this one was look at a lot of new developments. For example, we had one kind of theme that was called the Global Village, where we talked about the fact that not only are people using technology a lot more now to communicate and so again there's that, that worldwide need to make things easy to understand, and there's a lot of different factors one has to think about, but also looking at different languages and how we make, I think the English language a lot of people assume that that is going to be the language people are going to be trying to read and understand and what characteristics of the English language could make it more difficult for people who don't speak English, who are trying to get their information from the Internet.

Um, and also we brought in a lot of fields like Internet usability and accessibility to Web sites for people with disabilities. And that has more to do with how a Web site is coded so that even if the information is clear, would the coding allow someone who, for example, has a visual impairment, would they be able to access that information on the Internet? Uh, we brought in a lot of people from the health sector who, um, and that's a sector that is growing in awareness. There are lots of problems but I think there's a lot of awareness growing about the issue of health literacy.