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Toral Contractor
Write in plain language! It’s the law!
May 13th, 2011
If you haven’t heard yet, President Obama signed the Plain Writing Act of 2010 this past October. This law will require all publicly distributed documents (forms, publications, etc) by the federal government to have “writing that is clear, concise and well-organized”. You heard that right. That means anything we read from the government, on the web or in paper, will have to make sense. Sounds too good to be true? Probably. However, on April 13th, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued the “Final Guidance for the Plain Writing Act of 2010“. This memo is for all government agencies and states the requirements of the Act. There are two big deadlines for government agencies this year. By July 13th, each agency needs to establish internal processes for approving plain language and train employees on the use of it. By October 13th, all government agencies must write all new or revised documents in plain language. Do you think they’ll be able to get this done by October?
I can only imagine that this will be a big undertaking for many of the government agencies. Many of their internal processes for getting documents cleared requires several layers of approvals that often result in documents written in legalese. Sometimes the focus of writing for the audience gets lost through all the bureaucracy and, by the end of it, it’s not worth the trouble to have to get something rewritten because you need to go back through several approvals. This leaves visitors unable to understand the processes and sometimes inclined to visit third party sites that have nothing to do with the government, simply because the sites are written in understandable language.
I’m currently working on a redesign website project for a government agency and we have already started the process of training the staff on plain language. Our team is determined to make sure that the staff is always conscious of writing for their audience. Throughout the design process we have conducted usability tests and interviews to make sure that the user’s voice is always front and center. In the near future, we’ll be conducting a Cloze Test (a.k.a. cloze deletion test) to test the comprehension of the content. In a cloze test, you basically take out every 5th word or so from two or three paragraphs and let the user fill in the blanks. Sort of like Mad Libs, but not meant to be as funny. This test will allow us to see what words a user will use in those blanks and test the comprehension of the content. Along with all the training and the results of this test, we feel like we’ll be able to help the staff with understanding how a user is going to want to see content written for the site.
Even though I’m picking on government agencies, I’m sure (and I know) there are other websites out there that need some help with writing. Here are a couple of resources that will help with writing content in plain language:
There are some groups out there that are already doing a good job of writing in plain language. Take a look at the organizations that won the awards for writing their sites and documents in plain language.
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One Response 
Your article was ecxelelnt and erudite.