History of Plain English
From what I can discover, the origin of Plain English began with an English activist, Chrissie Maher who in the early 70's lobbied the British government to reform the wording of complicated forms in British life.
Outraged at the lack of progress on plain English, Maher officially launched Plain English Campaign by shredding gobbledygook on Parliament Square, Westminster. A passing policeman reads out the entire Riot Act and is infamously asked 'does that gobbledygook mean we have to go'' Dressed as the Gobbledygook Monster, Chrissie delivered the first issue of 'Plain English' magazine to 10 Downing Street.
In 1980 Plain English Campaign launched a professional editing service to provide enough funding to keep itself entirely independent. The first Plain English awards saw six organisations rewarded for their use of plain English,and 100 organisations collect a booby prize for gobbledygook ' the first Golden Bulls. In 1981 The Government responded to Plain English Campaign by setting up a review under Sir Derek Rayner. With the Campaign's help, the review rewrote 58,000 forms, making immediate savings of '15 million.
In 1983 Plain English Campaign published 'Small Print', a report on the gobbledygook used in contracts. The report included several examples of how a contract can be rewritten in plain English. 'Gobbledygook' was the Campaign's first published collection of waffle. The Cabinet Office then distributed 1700 copies of 'The word is' Plain English', a guide to clear writing for civil servants.
In 1987 Plain English has become so successful throughout the Civil Service that the Campaign introduced the 'Inside Write' awards, given solely for internal government communication. A new set of materials, 'The Plain English Course', allowed companies to train themselves in plain English for the first time. By its 10th anniversary, Plain English Campaign is being consulted by the majority of major organisations in the England. Plain English Campaign is now one of the largest plain language groups in the world, with over 30 full-time staff and with offices in the USA and Africa.
Plain English in Australia
In Australia, the Plain English movement was seized upon with a good deal of enthusiasm, and spearheaded by Robert D Eagleson, linguist and Professor of Linguistics at University of Sydney. In 1983 the Australian Government itself launched the Plain English and Simpler Forms Program in order to simplify a dizzying array of public service documents using the model imported from Britain. The movement spread to other kinds of documents especially legal documents with some success but also some degree of resentment. The obvious argument was that the reason the legal profession can charge such high fees, is precisely because the legal profession utilises intentional obscure language which only they themselves can decipher.
According to Eagleson's 1990 Federally funded monograph, Plain English can be used in the following places:
One of the first documents to be translated in to Plain English was the NRMA Plain English Insurance Policy of 1976. Some of the unexpected benefits of the policy were: greater productivity, less wastage of employees time, decreased staff training times, clearer information, less questions needed to be answered by senior staff members. The Victorian government reportedly saved $400K by rewriting just one cumbersome document. Staff salaries were the main saving, and these staff can be redeployed to more useful tasks than explaining a silly document. Cost savings in the UK are even more astronomical than these - figures like 900K pounds sterling being saved in a year for a one off cost of 24K pounds to rewrite the document.
There are no secrets to the Plain English approach just some common sense ideas that we should be aware of by now. Things like Purpose, Audience, Organisation, Language choices, Design and lots of Revision.
Strangely enough all the books which talk about Technical Writing from this period on seem to stress the same kinds of sentiments: be true to your audience, they are who matter - make sure that what you write is appropriate for that specific audience. Then you have done you job well. Anderson, the guru of Technical Writing says pretty much the same thing. Jakob Nielsen is saying this when he talks about Usability. Robin Williams says the same thing in designing information for desktop publishing. William Horton says the same thing about Online Documentation. Joseph M Williams says this about writing basic paragraphs. Even I am saying this all the time.
Critics of Plain English
The question arises: How do I know if I have done enough? How do I know when my document is Plain English'ed enough? Answer: well that's easy, when the audience can understand it...
Hang on.. the only proof of whether I have done my job, is if I have done my job' There is no objective way of telling the difference between a Plain English document and a gobbledegook one except by people being able to understand it' But the legal profession understands its contracts. (They really do ... scary right') This sounds rather like a circular argument such as: I know that that music is jazz, because all the jazz aficianados like it; or I know that animal over there is a dog, because it barks like a dog. How can you tell when you have written Plain English except by other people telling you they understand it' These people may equally understand the original. Just because it looks easier and does not contain jargon, does not automatically make for Plain English' Or does it?
There seems to be something missing here, for all of Plain English's recommendations.
This is exactly the approach taken by Robyn Penman of the Communication Research Institute of Australia in 1992. Penman started with the notion that no-one had actually empirically tested the comprehension of people when exposed to so-called gobbledegook and their Plain English translations. Everyone had for years believed that the simpler the document, the more easy it was to comprehend. So there were no tests performed on these documents to see if they really were able to understood better than the originals.
Penman (1992) suggests that the evidence for Plain English's success is usually based upon writing style, not reader's comprehension. She says: "Plain English is judged to work when Plain English is written." And just by shortening the number of words does not automatically make the work more accessible.
Using insurance-type (the NRMA's model is famous in Australia) documents Penman tested 18 subjects on two versions of the same information — the Plain English version (already existing) and her own rewritten New Version. (CRIA's main role has been the redesign of written forms and documents.) She found that her subjects could comprehend her new version better than the Plain English version on a whole range of questions. She then concludes that Plain English is not the answer here since it was the basic insurance concepts themselves that gave subjects the most trouble. i.e. Plain English, by itself did not help, even though it is accepted as gospel truth by every English speaking government in the world these days as a useful and good thing to do.
Penman argues that it too simplistic to 'just say fix the bad words, and shorten the sentences', and documents will become readable and more usable. I think she is correct here. But I think we should not throw out Plain English because it does not always work. We really need to do is educate writers, especially policy writers, and the public that good writing is not a simple task, and that good communication is more than just a formulaic skill.
When I attended a conference in Brisbane and went to the session with Robyn Penman, one of the more senior NZ academics questioned her use of the 2 different sets of documents, and said that the original Plain English documents were obviously not Plain Englished enough, and that Robyn must have produced real Plain English documents with her revamped copies. The heated debate that followed is not worth repeating except that Penman's work seriously challenges the status quo, and is worth considering for this very reason.