[laughs] Yeah, as you were talking Laura I was writing down a couple of things, and I also have a bugaboo with the education system in general and I'm also an adult educator and see a lot of that language, and I think that one of the first things that happens--especially with what you said Dave about the boards and where those terms are coming from--is there's a problem of what I call "Who's driving?" in that, you know, you can have a document that's constructed by so many different people including the boards, lawyers and perhaps maybe the educators themselves, and it's often very focused on the context and focus that they are going to need to use to measure their own outcomes (and even there I feel like I'm using some jargon)...

How good a job they're doing.

Yes, thank you Dave! And so I think that oftentimes and with any kind of writing, this is what plain language tries to undo. We often think so much about What needs to get out there, or What is the information we need to tell *them*? But on the other side we need to think Who's reading this, and what does that mean to them?

So, what you said about all these long words but no sense of, you know, "My child will learn how to tie his shoes," really what we try to advocate is that when people are writing to an audience who is going to have to understand that information. It has to be put in terms of the results that the child and the parents are trying to get, as opposed to the sort of long-winded, "bumphed" terms of what the educators or the boards or others are trying to accomplish--and that's really the disconnect there.

"Tying your shoes" would likely be have to do with "developing fine motor skills" or something.

[laughs] Exactly!

Thank you for that call Laura. Let's go to David from Owen Sound now. Hi David.

Oh hi there, how ya doin'?

Not too bad. Who needs a lesson in plain language?

Well, I think lawyers may need a lesson, but they already may know this. One thing that lawyers do that I see is they make everything complicated, and when their clients come in they explain it to them in layman terms. And if they can do this then, for anything that is written--be it an income tax explanation or what have you--if the lawyers can write this, then why can't they also attach something in layman's terms saying "Please read this. If you have any questions, then read the hard version." Interpreting the difficult explanation could take someone that didn't go to law school hours and hours, but if they had a framework to go from before they went to the difficult version, then they could read the easy version and say "Okay, I understand the gist of it. Now let's get into the difficult explanation of what the lawyer's trying to say."

And if they could somehow legislate these lawyers to give us both versions of what they're trying to say, then we could take the easy version that us laymen are trying to read, and use that to translate it to other languages.