Well, how often do you hear people say, "I've got a really good doctor because he explains things to me.". He might have gotten D's right through medical school but, because he can communicate better than a straight-A surgeon who uses a lot of jargon, people feel more comfortable.

Absolutely. I think a lot of it in any kind of environment--and again we brought people from a lot of different ones: business, government, the law, finance, health, you name it--who I think have the common goal of trying to make their information usable for the people who are trying to use it, and thinking about what is common to I guess plain language practice. And this also involves clear design of information as well. But also, what are the specific parts of each of those industries we need to pay attention to in trying to communicate clearly?

Someone I know was once hired to, um, translate I guess you could say--maybe that's a bit strong--uh income tax guides, and was hired on the basis that she knew how to write, but knew absolutely nothing about tax returns, like didn't even fill out her own, and was constantly running into brick walls because the people who did know about tax returns said, "No you can't put it that simply because, you know some smart tax lawyer can get around that or use that as an excuse for getting out of paying taxes. It has to be detailed and dense in order so that the government can cover all of its bases and collect the money that it's owed."

Yaw know, I don't want to, you know... that's probably not the only time that that reason is trotted out as why things seem to be more complicated than they need to be, but is it valid?

Ah... yes and no. Um, certainly, and I think too another reason that language--the sort of bumphing up or inflating of language is becoming a problem is that I know, especially in the US and even here to a degree, that people are becoming very litigious, and so everybody that says anything these days is concerned about how it could be interpreted, and how it would stand up in court. And I think that's why we're really fortunate to have people in the legal profession who understand that context of the law and what the words are intended to mean--and also how they could be misconstrued--that can advise those of us outside of the legal profession, where our information is affected by laws, they can help us with that in terms of, you know, letting us know that, okay well that word or that assumption could have a lot of interpretations. So, that's why we look to those folks to try and raise awareness in the legal profession.

Um, the same problem arises in consent forms. That's been a big issue that I've been involved with in terms of the same things. What if we don't put all of these different clauses and sub clauses in, and something happens to them, how is going to stand up in court? But my argument to that would be that if something is written, if you put so many paragraphs and clauses and sub clauses in, it could very well be that the very piece that they need to know--for example, What can happen to you if you take this treatment?--that gets buried, so they don't even get it, and they don't even actually see the information that they most need to get. So that has to do with how the information is designed as well as how it's worded.