Summary of my plain language experience
I offer plain language consulting, training, and content creation services. What this means is that I can help your organization communicate clearly and efficiently.
I had an early start in plain language in 2006. I worked with Jyoti Sanyal, the pioneer of plain language in India, at his organization Clear English India (CEI). This organization was funded by a grant from Martin Cutts of Plain Language Commission, UK.
At CEI, I worked on making legal copy (legalese) clearer and more human. I helped train the staff of one of India’s top private sector banks communicate clearly. I also worked on making the bank’s forms more understandable and easy to use.
When CEI folded up, I went on to work as a writer, editor, and communications professional. The summary of this part of my career can be found in my résumé.
I live with my family on a farm in south India. We grow some of our food and love the process (and the results)!
How can plain language help you?
- Saves time and money. Plain language makes your investment in communication worth it, because people actually understand it. In his book, Writing for Dollars, Writing to Please, Joe Kimble gives many examples of this. One of them goes thus: The US Department of Veterans Affairs sent letters to veterans to collect information about pension claims. After sending out 750 letters, the department received 1,128 calls with questions. The letter was revised using plain language. After sending out 710 of the new letters, just 192 calls were received.
- Builds trust. When people can understand the information you put out, they place their trust in you more easily than when they feel confused or being talked down to.
- Helps you communicate ethically. When people cannot understand the information that affects their rights, obligations, or health, the issue is not just inefficiency but potential injustice. Lawyers and legal institutions have an ethical responsibility to explain rights, risks, and consequences so citizens and clients can genuinely understand.
- Gives you the first mover advantage. When your competitors are all talking in obsolete, jargon-filled language, your text in plain language sets you apart. Farmers Insurance, an American company, showcased its switch to plain-language coverage tools as a marketing advantage. The company’s creative head said, "Our customers' insurance coverage should be easy to understand, with no jargon, no big words, and no lawyer needed to make sense of it."
- Reduces cognitive load. Plain language taxes the brain less. It is the ideal way to communicate to audiences that may be distracted or in a hurry – which pretty much covers everyone these days – stressed, ill, or semi-literate.
- Increases reach. When communicating with multilingual audiences, if the source text is in plain language, the translations are faster, accurate, and more engaging. Plain language can increase the translatability of a document because translators are readers too!
- Increases accessibility. Understandability is one of the pillars of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. Making content understandable “... helps software to read the content aloud, to generate page summaries, and to provide definitions for unusual words such as technical jargon. It also helps people who have difficulty understanding more complex sentences, phrases, and vocabulary. In particular, it helps people with different types of cognitive disabilities.”
- Helps manage risk. Plain language increases the chances of readers finding and understanding the information that they need to make informed decisions. It reduces the risk of poorly informed choices and undesired consequences. This can be useful in many sectors such as health, finance, and workplace safety.
Plain language services I offer
- Search engine optimization. It turns out that search engines, not just people, love plain language. I write well-structured and lean content with relevant keywords that go towards making your website more findable in search.
- Legal disclaimers that people can actually understand, and hence will read. In India, this has come to the fore thanks to the Digital Personal Data Protection Act. Indian companies have to suddenly contend with making consent forms understandable. I can help create understandable legal content or train your staff to do this.
- Transferring information from PDFs to html – it’s not just a format conversion. With my experience in content and my plain language skills, I help extract legacy information sitting in PDFs and rewrite it into clear web copy so that they can be discovered. Government sites often have useful, important information buried in PDFs – a format that is not search engine-friendly or accessible.
- Smooth user and customer experiences. Companies often spend oodles of money on marketing copy, but post-sale they start speaking a language that is boring and unhelpful in the least and misleading at the worst. An unbroken user or customer experience demands mails and messages that are in sync with the marketing avatar of the company, forms that are easier to understand and fill, and contracts that say and mean the same thing.
- Annual reports/SEBI offer documents/financial information. Companies the world over are switching to plain language in their annual reports and their offer documents to bring transparency. Sometimes, financial information can be complex. I will show you how to communicate to investors, customers of banks, and other consumers of business or financial information in a way that they feel empowered to make the right decisions for themselves.
- Effective health communication. I can train your staff writers to draft accurate, clear information that provides patients and their caregivers what they want to know about their condition and how they can cope with it. This is vital in these days of rampant misinformation.
If you are interested in any of these services, please get in touch using the form on the right or mail me at vijayalaxmiDOThegdeATgmailDOTcom
