Michelle Black from the Plain Language Association, my guest this afternoon on the Ontario Today phone-in. Who needs a lesson in plain language? That's our question [gives numbers to call]. Let's go to the phones. Laura's first in Toronto. Hi Laura.

Hi!

Who needs a lesson in plain language?

I think teachers, and people that are involved in education. I'm just going over some of the curriculum outlines for the Grade 3's in a school that my daughter goes to, and um, I'm really not sure for example, if you look at mathematics, what they are expected to know, um there are so many sub-genres and bizarre language, and little tiny "collecting and organizing and understanding and identifying," but they never say well "they have to know how to add, you know, two-digit numbers and very specific things." Like I remember when I was in school, you had little pictures on your report card in kindergarten at least, and you knew that when you were in Grade kindergarten you had to know how to tie your shoelaces.

And report cards are horrendous, because I don't think educators actually want to say, well you know your child is doing badly, they're afraid to put themselves on the line, so they use all these equivocations to avoid criticizing.

And even when you read the words like "Johnny is appropriately associating concepts of numeration..."

That's it! [laughs]

"Ya don't know whether to get too excited or not."

I think you could be a teacher!

Well, I don't know whether it's teachers or whether it's board officials or whether it's the Ministry of Education people, with standardized report cards, I don't know at whom the finger should be pointed but, Michelle, what do you make of that.