By Dana P Skopal, PhD
When planning a document to be written in plain English, you need to understand the readers’ requirements and know where to place the key information. To understand the readers’ requirements you need to know the purpose of the document.
Many style guides and government guidelines refer to plain English. For example, the NSW Department of Planning and Environment recently issued a guide to writing conditions of consent, relating to regionally significant developments under the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979 [https://www.planning.nsw.gov.au/-/media/Files/DPE/Guidelines/Policy-and-legislation/guide-to-writing-conditions-of-development-consent-202105.pdf]. The guide gives general advice in drafting plain English conditions and aims to assist development assessment planners at councils. The issue is how staff understand and can follow the principles of plain English while communicating important conditions or administrative details.
The guide to writing conditions sets out drafting principles, such as ‘… use plain English wherever possible. This means avoiding terms like “pursuant to” or “prior to” and just saying “under” or “before” ’ (p. 10). A writer can access many guides relating to plain English, but can they follow the guides and write in plain English? It is not only writers but managers too who should step back and see how they understand planning and drafting documents.
Plain language practitioners argue that clear communication involves a text’s content, language, structure, and design while focusing on the audience and the purpose of the communication. Those are a lot of points a writer needs to consider. Perhaps organisations need to invest in some effective writing training so staff can understand these related elements.
One way to get staff to re-think their approach is by starting with a simple task. Imagine you only had one minute or one page to get your message across – what information would you use and how would you present it? Tell that to a colleague and either record it or write the response down in a new file (or clean sheet of paper). By verbalising what you are trying to write often means you describe the relevant information. The most important information links to your key message and that should be up front.
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