IPLDay Oct 13 Toronto Event
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
1 like•384 views
Celebrate International Plain Language Day by taking the Toronto Plain Language Challenge. Presentation with Sally McBeth, Clear Language and Design. Find out more.
Recommended
More Related Content
What's hot
What's hot (19)
Viewers also liked
Viewers also liked (17)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
IPLDay Oct 13 Toronto Event
- 1. Toronto Plain Language Challenge International Plain Language Day Saturday, October 13, 2012
- 9. About late payment charges If we do not receive your payment for the total amount due by July 3, 2012, we will add a late payment charge to your next bill. The charge will be 1.5% a month, multiplied by the total you owe us. For example, if you owed $100, the late payment charge would be $1.50. We will keep charging 1.5% a month on all of the money you owe, including the interest, for as long as you do not pay. Over a year, that would equal a compounded interest rate of 19.56%. This interest rate is approved by the Ontario Energy Board, which regulates the province’s natural gas sector.
- 11. About late payment charges If we do not receive your payment for the total amount due by July 3, 2012, we will add a late payment charge to your next bill. The charge will be 1.5% a month, multiplied by the total you owe us. For example, if you owed $100, the late payment charge would be $1.50. We will keep charging 1.5% a month on all of the money you owe, including the interest, for as long as you do not pay. Over a year, that would equal a compounded interest rate of 19.56%. This interest rate is approved by the Ontario Energy Board, which regulates the province’s natural gas sector.
- 12. Join the Toronto Plain Language Challenge! Next year, we plan to hand out awards for the best and worst examples of business and government communication. Do you have an example you want to nominate? Send it to us care of: Carolyn Wilby Clear Language @ Work 542 Mount Pleasant Road Suite #306 Toronto, Ontario M4S 2M7 carolyn.wilby@clearlanguageatwork.com 416.489.2880
Editor's Notes
- When you get home after a long, busy day, this is the kind of notice that you quietly slip to the bottom of your mail pile and forget about. Why? Because the title, and much of the language in the flyer was likely composed by a City Engineer. It is so technical and forbidding. Who would want to read that except another engineer? Who else but an engineer would talk about the City being “subject to wet weather flow events”?
- Plain language experts use readability statistics to get a sense of the general level of reading difficulty in a passage of text, based on sentence length and the number of long words (over two syllables). We know from 70 years of research that North Americans prefer to read at a Grade 7 to 9 reading level, regardless of their level of education. That is the level that most newspapers, magazines, and popular novels are written at. This text is written at a Grade 12 level – a level that most people are only comfortable with when reading subject matter that is within their area of expertise. Not only that, but almost half of the sentences are written in the passive voice, which contributes to the flyer’s stodgy, distant tone.
- Here is our suggested rewrite and re-design of the flyer. Notice how we:Speak directly to the reader’s interests and immediate concerns in the headingBreak down the sentences so that there is only one thought per sentenceMove the technical name of the study down to the second paragraph. We did not eliminate it, because readers need to know what it is so that they can search for the study on the City’s website.Stress that the City wants to hear from the publicPlace the contact information on the front of the flyer, not the back where it could easily have been missed.
- This version of the flyer tests at Grade 8 – right on target for a general audience.
- Here is our second Plain Language Challenge – a paragraph from Sally’s Enbridge Gas bill.
- Read through this paragraph and see if you can tell me what an ‘effective rate’ is.
- Sally called Enbridge Gas to get an explanation. The customer service rep. said “That’s a really good question!” Then she went to look it up in the manual. She explained that what Enbridge was really talking about was compounding interest. Many people have trouble with the concept of compounding interest. They would especially have trouble with this explanation, because it is written at the Grade 19 reading level! (Notice that 100% of the sentences are written in the passive voice.)
- In our plain language makeover, we attempted to make the abstract concept of compounding interest a little more concrete, by giving the reader an example. We also shifted the distant tone of the passage, so that we are now directly addressing the reader.When Sally sent this version out with her newsletter, she received an interesting comment from an ‘industry insider’. He said that “Enbridge are not allowed to charge interest and that is why they don’t use that term.” If we were formally consulting with Enbridge on this wording, we would certainly take this into consideration. But the word ‘interest’ is what cues the consumer to understand that the late payment charge compounds. Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck ... Sure looks like a duck to the consumer.
- The insider also pointed out that we had left out the sentence about how the rate applies to “all other charges” on the bill. But since the Enbridge bill highlights just one “Total Amount Due Now,” we felt it was clear that the late payment charges apply to the whole total, not just some of the items on the bill.
- After our rewrite, the passage is at a Grade 9 reading level.
- Facilitator: Encourage discussion all through the presentation and at the end. Encourage people to talk about examples of gobbledygook in their daily lives. Tell them about our Toronto Region Network. Encourage them to send examples and to note down Carolyn’s contact info.