CHRISTOPHER BALMFORD: “It’s easy to write the way you’ve always written, so making the change is hard. It’s probably harder to write in plain language because you need to think deeper and harder about what you’re saying.”
Christopher Balmford says resistance often comes from lawyers who are concerned that changes in their writing could change the meaning of their documents. But he says more lawyers are moving in the right direction in several countries including Australia, the United Kingdom and Canada.
CHRISTOPHER CRUISE: So imagine you have a document that you want to rewrite using plain language. Where is the best place to begin?
CHISTOPHER BALMFORD: “The very best place to start, and it’s the best place to end as well, is to find out what current users of the document think.”
This is known as document testing or usability testing, and you can learn more about this process on the Internet. You can also find other resources online and in books to learn about writing in plain language.
In English, for example, using the active voice can make a sentence clearer than using the passive voice. The website plainlanguage.gov gives some examples. Here is a sentence in passive voice: "The lake was polluted by the company." Now here it is in active voice: "The company polluted the lake." Another example: "New regulations were proposed" is passive voice. You can make that into active voice by simply writing: "We proposed new regulations."
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2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25