Category: Editing

Access to information: The role of editors (EAC-BC meeting)

At the November EAC-BC meeting, Shana Johnstone, principal of Uncover Editorial + Design, moderated a panel discussion that offered rich and diverse perspectives on accessibility. (She deftly kept the conversation flowing with thematic questions, so although her words don’t show up much in my summary here, she was critical to the evening’s success.)

Introductions

Panel members included:

The Crane Library, Nygard explained, is named after Charles Crane, who in 1931 became the first deafblind student to attend university in Canada. Over his life he accumulated ten thousand volumes of works in Braille, and when he died, his family donated the collection to the Vancouver Public Library, which then donated it to UBC. Paul Thiele, a visually impaired doctoral student, and his wife, Judith, who was the first blind library student (and later the first blind librarian) in Canada, helped set up the space for the Crane Library, including a Braille card catalogue and Braille spine labels so that students could find materials on their own. Today the Crane Library is part of Access and Diversity at UBC and offers exam accommodations, narration services (it has an eight-booth recording studio to record readings of print materials), and materials in a variety of formats, including PDF, e-text, and Braille.

Gray, who has a background in recreational therapy, used to work with people who had brain injuries, and for her, it was “a trial-and-error process to communicate with them just to do my job,” she said. Through that work she developed communication strategies that take into account not only the language but also formats that will most likely appeal to her audience. To reach a community, Gray said, it’s important to understand its language and conventions. “It’s about getting off on the right foot with people. If you turn people off with a phrase that is outside their community, they stop reading.” It’s also important to know who in a community is doing the reading. In the Down syndrome community, she said, “people are still writing as if the caregivers are the ones reading” even though more people with developmental disability are now reading for themselves.

Booth works with forty-five groups (such as the Writers’ Exchange) that provide literacy support in the Downtown Eastside, which he emphasized is “a neighbourhood, not a pejorative.” He defined literacy as the “knowledge, skills, and confidence to participate fully in life,” and he told us that “There is more stigma around illiteracy than there is around addiction.”

Busting misconceptions

Within the Downtown Eastside, said Booth, there are “multiple populations with multiple challenges and multiple experiences—sometimes bad—with learning.” Residents may be reluctant to get involved with structured educational opportunities, and so they rely on community organizations to reach out to them. The media does the Downtown Eastside a disservice by portraying it as the “poorest postal code in Canada,” Booth says. To him, all of his clients, regardless of their background, bring skills and experience to the table.

Gray agreed, adding that it’s easy to make judgments based on appearance. She knows that her three-year-old son, who has Down syndrome, is taking in more than he’s putting back out. The same holds for people who have had strokes or people with cerebral palsy. Some people may not speak well, but they may read and understand well. She acknowledges that we all bring preconceptions to every interaction, but it’s important to set them aside and ask questions to get to know your audience.

“What do we think of, when we think of a person with a disability?” said Nygard. “Not all disabilities are visible.” People assume that text-to-speech services are just for the visually impaired, but often they are for students with learning disabilities who prefer human voice narration. The students who use the Crane Library’s services are simply university students who need a little more support to be able to do certain academic activities. They are people with access to resources and technology that will help them get a university education.

People also assume that technology has solved the accessibility problem. Although a lot of accessibility features are now built into our technology, like VoiceOver for Macs and Ease of Access on Windows, computers aren’t the answer for everyone. For some people, technology hasn’t obviated Braille.

Their work—The specifics

Gray said that although she works primarily with print materials, she’s started writing as though the text would destined for the web. “I’m no longer assuming that people are reading entire chunks of material. I’m not assuming they’re following along from beginning to end or reading the whole thing. I’m using a lot more headings to break up the material and am continually giving people context. I’m not assuming people remember the topic, so I’m constantly reintroducing it.” People with Down syndrome have poor short-term memory, she said, so she never assumes that a reader will refer to earlier text where a concept was first introduced. “Don’t dumb it down,” she said, “but use plain language. Keep it simple and to the point.” Some writers enjoy adding variety to their writing to spice things up, she said. “Take the spice out. Keep to the facts.”

That said, editors also have to keep in mind that when people read, they’re not just absorbing facts; they’re approaching the material with a host of emotions. For people who have children with Down syndrome, she said, “everything they’re reading is judging them as a parent.”

“We don’t know where people are at and where their heads are when they’re taking the materials in,” Gray said.

To connect with the audience, said Booth, listening is a vital skill to develop. “Storytelling is a really important art form. Everybody has a story, and everybody will tell you their story if you give them the opportunity.”

Nygard compares her work to directing traffic—making sure resources flow to to people who need them. She explained the process of creating alternate formats: students have to buy a new textbook and give Nygard the receipt, at which point she can request a PDF from the publisher. But is it fair, she asked, to make these students buy the book at full price when their classmates can get a used copy for a discount? Another inequity is in the license agreement; often they allow students to use the PDF for the duration for the course only, when other students can keep their books for future reference. Image-only or locked PDFs are problematic because text-to-speech software like JAWS can’t read it.

For books that exist only in print, the conversion process involves cutting out the pages and manually scanning them to PDF, then running them through an OCR program to create a rough Word document. These documents then get sent to student assistants who clean them up for text-to-speech software. Otherwise, columns, running heads, footnotes, and other design features can lead to confusing results. We get a lot of context from the way text is laid out and organized on the page, said Nygard, but that context is lost when the text is read aloud.

Editors as advocates

Gray said she’d never considered herself an advocate per se. “I do think it’s part of my role to advise clients about the level of content and the way it’s presented. We need to make sure we can reach the audience.”

When we make decisions, said Nygard, we have to look out for people in the margins that we might not be addressing.

Booth said, “We’re all very privileged in this room. We have a responsibility to be advocates. Our tool is language.” As he spoke he passed out copies of Decoda Literacy Manifesto to each member of the audience.

Resources on accessibility

Nygard suggested we check out the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act. Ontario has been a leader in this arena. She also mentioned the National Network for Equitable Library Service (NNELS), which allows collection sharing between various libraries. Many public libraries don’t find out about the Crane Library’s services, because it’s at an academic institution, but its collection is available to the general public. The NNELS site also has a section of tutorials for creating alternate-format materials. SNOW, the Inclusive Design Centre at OCAD, also has some excellent resources.

Compared with Ontario, said Nygard, BC lags behind in its commitment to accessibility. The BC government released Accessibility 2024, a ten-year plan to make the province the most progressive within Canada. But both Nygard and Booth call it “embarrassing.” “How they’ve set their priorities is a horror show,” said Nygard. One of the benchmarks for success in this accessibility plan, for example, is to have government websites be accessible by 2016, without addressing the concerns of whether people with disabilities have the skills, literacy, or access to technology to use that information. Meanwhile, disability rates haven’t gone up since 2007.

Booth agreed. The province has cut funding for high-school equivalency programs (GED), ESL, literacy, and adult basic education, choosing instead to focus on “job creation in extractive industries and training people to do specific jobs. What’s going to happen in a decade from now for people who don’t have education?”

In response to a question from the audience, Nygard acknowledged that  Project Gutenberg and Project Gutenberg Canada are great for accessible text of works in the public domain. She also mentioned that LibriVox has public domain audiobooks.

Stefan Dollinger—Forks in the road: Dictionaries and the radically changing English-language ecosystem (EAC-BC meeting)

Stefan Dollinger, faculty member in the English and linguistic departments at the University of British Columbia, is editor-in-chief of the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (DCHP), and he spoke to the EAC-BC crowd about the role of dictionaries in the global English landscape.

His fascinating talk covered some of the same territory that I wrote about when I first saw him speak last year, so I’ll focus on his new content here.

English, said Dollinger, is unique in that it is the only language in the world with more second-language speakers than native speakers, the former outnumbering the latter by five to one. This ratio will only grow as more people in China, Russia, continental Europe, and South America use English for trade and diplomacy. Until recently, the study of English—particularly for dictionaries—had focused on native speakers, but scholars such as Barbara Seidlhofer, of the University of Vienna, have argued that English as a lingua franca (ELF) is the “real” English.

This shifting view influences how we approach dictionary making, which has generally used one of two methods:

  • In the literary tradition, lexicographers collect works from the best authors and compiled excerpts showing usage.
  • In the linguistic method, lexicographers empirically study language users.

One of the best examples of dictionaries compiled using the linguist method is the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), which Dollinger said is based on superb empirical data, including historical sources as well as a national survey of about three thousand users. The dictionary includes only “non-standard” regional words that are not used nationally in the United States and hence isn’t a comprehensive compilation of English words, but for researchers like Dollinger, the detail on regional, social, and historical uses is more important than the number of entries.

In contrast, the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) used the literary tradition, and, as the preface to the third edition admits,

The Dictionary has in the past been criticized for its apparent reliance on literary texts to illustrate the development of the vocabulary of English over the centuries. A closer examination of earlier editions shows that this view has been overstated, though it is not entirely without foundation.

Although the OED has become more linguistic in its methodology, residues of the literary tradition persist: Dolliger said that about 50 percent of the entries the current edition, OED-3, are unchanged from the original edition, and although the OED employs a New Word Unit, a group of lexicographers who read content on the web and compile new words and senses, such a reading program is still not empirical and will fail to capture the usage of everyday speakers.

Going completely online, however, has allowed the OED to respond more nimbly to changes in the language: corrections to existing entries can now be made immediately, and the dictionary issues quarterly updates, adding a few hundred new words, phrases, and senses each time.

Dollinger feels that if the OED wants to keep claiming to be the “definitive record of the English language,” though, it will have to reorient its approach to include more fieldwork to study linguistic variation across the globe, focusing not only on what linguist Braj Kachru defined as the “inner circle,” where the majority of people are native English speakers (e.g., the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, New Zealand) but also on the “outer circle” of former British colonies like India, Singapore, etc., and especially on the “expanding circle” of countries, like Russia and China, with no historical ties to England—not to mention English-based pidgins and creoles. Although some native speakers may consider this shift threatening, Dollinger quoted H.G. Widdowson, who in 1993 wrote:

How English develops in the world is no business whatever of native speakers in England, the United States, or anywhere else. They have no say in the matter, no right to intervene or pass judgement. They are irrelevant. The very fact that English is an international language means that no nation can have custody over it. To grant such custody of the language is necessarily to arrest its development and so undermine its international status.

How, then, do lexicographers distinguish innovations from errors? World Englshes are replete with words that are unfamiliar to the native speaker, like

  • stingko, meaning “smelly” in Singapore English;
  • teacheress, a female teacher, in Indian English;
  • peelhead, a bald-headed person, in Jamaican English; or
  • high hat, a snob in Philippine English

Whether these are right depends only on the variety of English in question. Linguist Ayo Bamgbose suggested using the following criteria to judge whether a word or phrase is an error or innovation:

  • The demographic factor: How many acrolectal speakers speak it?
  • The geographical factor: Where is it used?
  • The authoritative factor: Who sanctions its use?
  • Codification: Does it appear in dictionaries and reference books?
  • The acceptability factor: What are the attitudes of users an non-users toward the word?

Dollinger is applying some of these principles to his work on DCHP, the first edition of which (now known as DCHP-1) began as a bit of a pet project for American lexicographer Charles Lovell. As a researcher for A Dictionary of Americanisms, published in 1951, Lovell began collecting Canadianisms. In 1958, Gage Educational Publishing asked Lovell to compile a dictionary for the Canadian Linguistic Association. After Lovell’s sudden death in 1960, Gage approached Walter S. Avis, known as “the pioneer of the study of Canadian English” and Matthew H. Scargill to continue his work. Together they finished and edited the dictionary and published it in 1967. That dictionary became the basis of Gage’s Canadian dictionary.

The 1990s saw a “Canadian Dictionary War,” with too many publishers—Gage Canadian, ITP Nelson, and the Canadian Oxford—competing in one market. Backed by a fierce marketing campaign, the Canadian Oxford won out.

In March 2006, Dollinger became editor-in-chief of the second edition of the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (DCHP-2), with Nelson Education providing seed funding. In 2013, DCHP-1 was released online, and Dollinger expects DCHP-2 to be complete in early 2016. Owing to time constraints, some entries from DCHP-1, which dug deep into the history of the fur trade for much of its content, will persist in DCHP-2, but these will be clearly marked as being from the original edition and annotated if necessary.

In compiling DCHP-2, Dollinger has noticed that some terms have considerable regional variation and wonders whether we should be considering national isoglosses at all, considering the U.S. and Canada have the world’s longest undefended border. As an example, he showed that whereas Western Canadians prefer the term “running shoes” or “runners,” those in Eastern Canada prefer “sneakers,” which mirrors the regional variation across the northern United States. He also noted that these kinds of variations would be much harder to identify through the literary method of dictionary making.

Another interesting feature of the entries in DCHP-2 is that 70 percent of the entries are compound nouns. “Butter isn’t uniquely Canadian, tart isn’t Canadian, but butter tart is,” said Dollinger. “Cube isn’t Canadian, and van isn’t Canadian, but cube van is.”

Dollinger wondered too if it was time for lexicographers to get even more granular and consider the variation within regional Englishes. In what ways, for example, might English spoken by a Chinese Canadian be unique?

As part of his research, Dollinger is asking British Columbians to complete a twenty-minute survey to help him and his students understand how they use English.

Jumpcut: a clipboard-buffering tool editors will love

I installed Jumpcut after a tragic case of stupidity led to my losing a bunch of text I’d cut. Before I could paste it, I got distracted and copied something else, overwriting the text on my clipboard.

Jumpcut offers clipboard buffering: it stores up to ninety-nine clippings, so you can paste something you cut a while ago, even if you’ve since cut or copied something else. Although I installed it as insurance against my cut & paste brain farts, I discovered that the application is enormously useful for editing. It lets you cut or copy noncontiguous chunks of text and then paste them somewhere else, in any order and as many times as you need.

Last week the Chicago Manual of Style tweeted about Microsoft Word’s spike feature, which lets you cut several separate chunks of text and paste them all at once, but Jumpcut is better: Word’s spike allows only cutting, whereas Jumpcut allows both cutting and copying, meaning you don’t have to destroy your source document. What’s more, Jumpcut works across applications, so you can copy content from your web browser or a PDF and paste it into Word. I’ve been using it for only a week, but Jumpcut has already proven to be a huge timesaver by helping me replicate chapter headings in backmatter, add cross-references to an index I was editing, and copy quotes for a paper without having to bounce around between applications.

Best of all, Jumpcut is free.

Once you have Jumpcut installed, you can access your most recent clippings from the Jumpcut logo on the menu bar using your mouse, but you can also bring up your clippings with the shortcut key Ctrl + Option + V and then, holding down Ctrl + Option, use the arrow keys to scroll through them and select the ones you want.

Jumpcut is available for Mac only, but Windows users could try some of these alternatives. I haven’t used any of them, though, and can’t vouch for them. If you have any experience with them, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Communication Convergence 2014

Plain language advocates Cheryl Stephens and Katherine McManus teamed up with the Society for Technical Communication’s Autumn Jonssen and EAC-BC’s Amy Haagsma to organize the first Communication Convergence mini-conference as part of the Vancouver celebrations of International Plain Language Day, October 13. Because IPL Day coincides with Thanksgiving this year, we celebrated one weekend earlier, on October 5.

The afternoon included a networking buffet lunch, followed by three panel discussions. I was a panellist on the first, which explored the tendency for different communication fields to apply a common range of methods. Joining me were:

Frances Peck moderated.

The second panel looked at the real-world demand on communicators and featured

Katherine McManus moderated.

The third panel, hosted by

  • Lisa Mighton, director of communications and community liaison at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at UBC
  • Paula LaBrie, marketing communications specialist;
  • and Cheryl Stephens, who moderated,

was more of an open discussion asking where we—as a community of communicators dedicated to plain language—go from here.

We had eleven speakers and three moderators, as well as plenty of comments and questions from the floor, so although the format made for invigorating discussion, I couldn’t capture everything that everyone said in my notes. Not pretending to do all of the participants justice, I’ll just give an overview of my impressions and the points I found most interesting. Because there was a lot of overlap among the three sessions, I’ll focus on the day’s themes rather than the specifics from each panel. (Find photos of the Communication Convergence event on IPL Day’s Twitter.)

Writing and editing for the audience (sometimes easier said than done)

We all agreed that the audience is paramount when we craft our communications. Joe Goodwill pointed out the importance of considering the audience’s cultural context, which can be very different from our own.

What can get especially tricky is when your work has to go through several layers of approval, said Heidi Turner. Frances Peck agreed: often at each of those levels managers and directors reintroduce jargon and officialese and undo all of the work you’ve done to make that text accessible. Turner always tries to advocate for plain language, telling those clients for whom she writes grants that “A funder won’t want to give you money just because you use big words,” but from a business standpoint she ultimately has to give her clients what they want, and sometimes they don’t have a very good idea of who their readers are.

How do you write for disparate audiences? Sometimes you have to create more than one document, and Stephens reminded us that there will always be some people we can’t reach with our writing. But if your hands are tied, Elizabeth Rains said to “use the plainest language possible that will satisfy your readers’ needs.” She firmly believes that “no matter what type of information you have, it can be explained simply. And you may find that you can use that same language to explain concepts to very, very different audiences.”

Tools and resources

Pam Drucker’s work as a technical communicator has evolved over the years; today, she no longer works on large manuals but instead writes individual articles or topics. Her most consulted resources include the

She also uses structured writing techniques (e.g., Information Mapping).

Plain language as a right

Beyond the arguments that clear communication is more efficient and will get better results, what motivates many advocates of plain language is that we feel it’s a human rights issue. Information can be life altering, sometimes life saving. Citizens need to understand their government’s legislation to participate in a democracy. People with health issues deserve to understand their treatment options to achieve the best health outcomes. What can we do get people the information they need?

Christabelle Kux-Kardos works with immigrants and seniors, among others, to help them access community and government services. Her approach is to do what she calls a literacy audit: she tries to step back and try to see the world through the lens of a new client. This process has shown her that some services, even essential ones, have poor signage and are hard to find, particularly if you don’t know the language well or aren’t comfortable with technology. She sees it as her responsibility to point out to those services what they could be doing better. A lot of her work, she said, involves talking with her clients to tease out the right questions. What don’t they know that they need to know? Often they don’t know what they don’t know.

Nicholson reminds us that for some people, there is value in misrepresentation. “There are circumstances in which people are vested in obfuscating,” she said. “We have to be loud enough to cut through the clutter.”

Beyond comprehension to persuasion

Did the audience understand the message? Achieving understanding is always the communicator’s goal, but should it stop there? How do we persuade people to act on that information?

Hompoth, an image consultant, said that we are judged on

  • how we look,
  • what we do,
  • what we say, and
  • how we say it.

What we say accounts for 7 percent of the message, but how we say it counts for 13 percent (with other non-verbal communication making up the balance). In other words, our delivery is more important than our content.

That reality certainly jibes with health and science communications. How best to achieve persuasion is an unanswered question from a knowledge translation point of view: we can present people with evidence that smoking harms health, but evidence alone isn’t enough to convince some smokers to quit. Whether our message spurs change depends on the audience’s level of motivation.

As much as some of us may shy away from marketing, if we really want to effect change, we may have to study it. Will a course in psychology eventually be a required part of communications training?

Communication in and from academia

Those who know me know that one of my life’s missions is to try to eradicate turgid writing from academia. Academese is unnecessary, it hinders understanding and collaboration, and, because research is mostly taxpayer funded, it is undemocratic. Part of my research in knowledge translation involves finding alternative means of communicating research so that stakeholders beyond a researcher’s own colleagues can find and use it. Journal articles haven’t fundamentally changed in sixty years: if you print one out, it will still be in tiny type, packed onto a page with no space to breathe.

But we are making some gains. Many journals, North American ones, especially, are more accepting now than ever of first-person pronouns in journal articles. The style can be more conversational, and as research necessarily gets more interdisciplinary, researchers are beginning to recognize that they need a lingua franca to work together, and that lingua franca is plain language. We still have a long way to go, but we can celebrate these small victories.

Jandciu’s programs at UBC try to tackle the problem earlier, with communications courses designed specifically for science students. Although the Faculty of Science had always acknowledged that its students needed to develop communication skills, it usually left that training to first-year English courses. Feedback from graduating students, though, showed that those courses weren’t adequately preparing them to write reports and scientific articles or prepare and give presentations. Now the Faculty of Science offers a first-year course that integrates communication into science training and helps students develop scientific arguments. A third-year course has students interview researchers and develop videos and podcasts. Even funders, said Jandciu, are wanting researchers to do more outreach using social media, videos, and multimedia. Research communication can no longer be just text based.

He occasionally still hears students say, “But I’m in science because I don’t like to write,” or “I can’t do presentations,” but after the courses they realize the value of being able to communicate their scientific expertise. They begin to grasp that a lot of legislation hinges on policy makers getting sound information, and right now scientists aren’t doing a good enough job getting it out to them or to the public. “We need science students to stop thinking of communication as separate from their science,” said Jandciu.

Jeff Richmond, a journalist, responded that a lot of blame is put on “the media” for distorting research. And although it’s true that some stories can get sensationalized, if you talk to individual journalists, they typically have the sincerest of intentions. How does the distortion happen, and how we can express ideas in plain language without altering the facts?

Increasing awareness and uptake of plain language

We were all preaching to the converted at Communication Convergence—we all understand the value of plain language. But not everyone thinks the way we do. Nicholson said that we know that clear communication is the ethical choice, but when it comes to convincing others, some people and organizations simply won’t respond unless you show them the economic benefits.

And Stephens said that although professional legal associations support plain language, there’s still a culture of resistance among practising lawyers. I believe the key is in subtle shifts—a kind of quiet rebellion. There are several tacks to plain language; do what you can within the bounds of the culture, but start gathering evidence that what you are doing is producing results.

Does the public at large realize what they’re missing when communication isn’t clear? How can we raise awareness of plain language?

Paula LaBrie suggested that we all find a way to celebrate International Plain Language Day at our workplaces and spread the word about it. Lisa Mighton said we should always look for opportunities to turn our work into a media story.

The ideas from the crowd reinforced the community’s need for a central repository of plain language information: research, case studies, history. I urged everyone to join the Clear Communication Wiki and start contributing to it. It has the potential to become a valuable resource, but it needs a critical mass of participation.

***

My key takeaway from Communication Convergence is that being able to say “I don’t understand” is a privilege. The most disenfranchised among us may not realize that there’s an alternative to confusing communication or may feel that revealing their lack of comprehension might make them look ignorant, compromising their position.

We communicators need to acknowledge our privilege and use it to push for change. “By not calling people on their poor communication practices,” said McManus, “we’re making people—maybe generations of people—put up with a lack of information. It becomes the responsibility of communicators not to just throw up our hands and give up.”

Stephens and McManus hope to make Communication Convergence an annual event. If you have ideas for session topics or speakers, get in touch via LinkedIn or Twitter.

Book review: The Sense of Style

We humans have been speaking for a lot longer than we’ve been writing, which is why the former comes to us so much more naturally. When we write, explains Steven Pinker in The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, the physical and temporal distance between us and our audience means it’s impossible to monitor their body language and adjust how we’re communicating to keep them engaged. That distance also makes it easy for us to lose sight of our audience entirely.

But if we aspire to what literary scholars Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner called classic style, we can make our writing as effortless to read as holding a conversation. “The guiding metaphor of classic style is seeing the world,” says Pinker. “The writer can see something that the reader has not yet noticed, and he and he orients the reader’s gaze so that she can see it for herself.” (pp. 28–29)

Keeping this metaphor in mind can help you steer clear of the hallmarks of stuffy prose: the self-conscious hedging, the tedious signposting, the metadiscourse, as well as nominalizations (Pinker borrows Helen Sword’s term, “zombie nouns”) and excessive use of passive voice. Yet, it also highlights why some of those devices can be useful. The passive, for example, can help steer your reader’s attention toward the receiver of an action, if that’s where you’d like her to look, and a nominalization can be an economical way to refer to a topic you’ve just introduced. As Pinker says:

The advice to bring zombie nouns back to life as verbs and to convert passives into actives is ubiquitous in style guides and plain language laws… But it’s good advice only when a writer or editor understands why it’s being offered. No English construction could have survived in the language for a millennium and a half unless it had continued to serve some purpose, and that includes passives and nominalizations. They may be overused, and often they are badly used, but that does not mean they should not be used at all. (p. 55)

Pinker encourages writers (and editors, by extension) to be discerning and to think critically about communicative effect, which is what sets The Sense of Style apart from other writing guides. It is not just a list of dos and don’ts, although the final chapter, “Telling right from wrong,” does cover which so-called rules you can safely ignore (perhaps grammatical rules that careful writers and speakers regularly break are not rules at all) and which you should probably heed. The motivation for following these rules, though, should not be the self-righteousness of being correct but the desire to be as clear as possible without irritating your readers—some of whom may have been taught to live by the sticklers’ and pedants’ old-school rules. Another of this book’s distinguishing features is that it grounds its advice on evidence, not just an intuitive sense of what reads well—as useful as that intuition may be for strong writers and editors. Pinker offers us psycholinguistic insight into why separating a subject from its predicate makes a sentence harder to read and why negative statements take longer to process than positive ones. It seems the common trait of stylistic infelicities is that they all slow a reader down.

The source of a lot of bad writing, says Pinker, is what he calls the curse of knowledge: forgetting that our readers don’t know exactly what we do. When we fail to give enough background or properly define a term, we risk confusing the reader. Similarly, if, when moving from one sentence to the next, we don’t show how the two are related semantically, we can leave the reader stranded. The strongest writers, says Pinker, are those that have mastered connectives: coordinators and subordinators (what we’ve traditionally called conjunctions), as well as phrases like “in contrast,” and “on the other hand.”

Pinker’s terminology may differ a bit from what many of us learned in school, and for good reason. When we were taught that “Adam’s” in “Adam’s apple” is an adjective, we conflated grammatical category (genitive noun) with grammatical function (determiner). It’s not that “ice” in “ice cream” has magically turned from noun to adjective but that nouns may function as modifiers. To great effect, Pinker uses the “sentence as tree” metaphor, using tree diagrams, ubiquitous in linguistics, to show how a sentence can be parsed. English, he explains, is a right-branching language: we expect new information to be added on as we move from the beginning of a sentence to the end. Too many left branches, as in a noun string, where we have to store a bunch of modifiers before we get to the thing being modified, gobbles up our working memory. We don’t have to create tree diagrams to write effective sentences, but they are another tool in our toolkit that we can reach for to help us untangle unwieldy prose.

Pinker covers an enormous swath of territory in this eminently sensible guide, from diction to syntax to paragraph structure and beyond, and I can’t even begin to do it justice in this short review. Editors will find The Sense of Style illuminating, hilarious, and (for all but the most pedantic sticklers) affirming. Pinker’s guidance resonates with my own approach to editing (although, counter to his advice, I’ll stay away from using “which” in a restrictive sense—for now), and it’s a refreshing change from the prescriptivist writing guides that don’t account for language change or register. I delighted in reading about such topics as how punctuation restores some of the prosody of spoken language—intonation, emphasis, pauses—and how the demise of “whom” and the subjunctive mood has been exaggerated. (The book, incidentally, also has a great index, which extends its life from an effervescent read to what will undoubtedly be a much-consulted reference.)

“Credible guidance on writing must itself be well written,” says Pinker in the prologue, “and the best of the manuals are paragons of their own advice.” (p. 1) This book is no exception. The prose in The Sense of Style is ambrosia, and I guzzled it greedily.

Dominique Joseph on translation and the plain language writing process

Last week I asked for input about where translation fits into the plain language process. Editor, translator, and plain language specialist Dominique Joseph contributed such a well-thought-out response—so long she put it on a Google Doc rather than directly in the comments—that I felt leaving it buried would not do it justice. She’s given me permission to reproduce it in full here.

Do you have more thoughts to contribute to this discussion? How does translation fit into your plain language workflow? Let’s keep the conversation going, either here or in the original post.

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Your post touches on so many fascinating topics, Iva!

I’ve chosen to focus, rather quickly, on these 5 aspects:

  1. How language-specific is plain language?
  2. If the original is in plain language, will the translation be, too?
  3. Where does translation fit in the writing process?
  4. Examples: translation in plain language (reader-focused) projects
  5. Short conclusion: the writing process

1. How language-specific is plain language

Surprisingly, it’s really not that language-specific. Apart from a few tiny details, what applies to English also applies to French (and to German, and Spanish, etc.).

An important distinction: I’m not talking here from a “narrow” plain language perspective, which focuses only on words and sentences. Instead, I’m talking from the wider (I’m tempted to say, more modern) “big plain language” or clear communication perspective.

It’s bigger than just words and sentences. The key elements:

  • focusing on the reader, the reader’s needs, the purpose of the document and the context of use (to produce a reader-focused, usable document);
  • then, deciding what to say, how to organize it, how to say it, how to present it visually.

Almost all of this applies to all Western languages. Although some potential problems or solutions may be language-specific, mostly at the sentence and word level (think of “on” in French, or noun chains in English), these peculiarities are but a tiny, tiny bit of the whole picture.

The most important parts of clear communication apply across languages. That’s something we actually discussed a fair bit as part of the IC Clear project. We wondered whether it made sense to teach clear communication and clear writing modules in English to a multilingual public, whether the contents would actually be useful to them. And we concluded that yes, it would be relevant, it would work.

To go back to the Government of Canada guides [Plain Language: Clear and Simple and Pour un style clair et simple]… The French and English could have been almost identical. It’s just that the teams decided to work independently and each produce their own guide.

For example, the section on testing is a lot more detailed in English than in French. But it didn’t have to be that way. Also, the French team decided to talk about punctuation, but the English team didn’t. Again, the difference comes from the authors’ choices, not from differences between both languages.

Since we’re talking about plain language across multiple languages, here are a few interesting links. These two are from the European Union:

  1. How to write clearly (available in 23 languages; scroll down to download a PDF)
  2. Clear writing newsletter (from the EU Translation section)

Also interesting: a discussion we had on the LinkedIn group “Plain Language Advocates.” Lots of interesting comments!

2. If the original is in plain language, will the translation be, too?

Many people assume that if you have a plain language original, the translation will automatically be in plain language. That’s wrong (sorry guys!).

It depends a lot on the translator. If you give the same text to 5 translators, you’ll get 5 different versions, some of which will be easier to read and understand than others. Some translators—like some writers—are better at producing clear, understandable texts.

What can help: choosing the translator wisely; giving him or her good info about the context, the users, the goals, etc.

3. Where does translation fit in the writing process

That’s a huge question! First, here are a few ideas. You’ll see examples in the next section.

Instead of seeing translation as one box to fit into the existing chain, I’d like to suggest another way to look at it. (It’s something I discovered around 2001, while working at Clarica. I learned later that Michel Gauthier, from the federal government, was also a fan of that same approach.)

This idea came from examining the writing process for a typical text.

Let’s assume we’re talking about an English text which will be translated into French. Think about all the skills, knowledge and experience that often go into creating the original: you’ll have subject matter experts, writers, people with experience in the field… all working together to produce the document.

Then it’s sent to a translator. One person. Who’s typically a language expert, not a subject matter expert, not an expert in the field (never had contact with the clients or the intended audience), and probably not an expert in clear writing either. Just one person, one set of skills, one pair of eyes.

Do you see the imbalance? We end up with many steps (and people and sets of skills) coming together for the original text, and only one step for the French version.

What I’ve found works very well is to “re-balance” that process so that the French version gets as much input as the English.

Basically, we’re restarting another writing process, but focused on the French.

That means using the translation not as a final version, but as a starting point. Then you bring together your French experts, writers and communicators (subject matter experts, people with experience in the field, etc.). You look at all aspects of the text—choice of information, structure, wording, design—and see whether they’ll fit your audience and context, and what can improved. And you test your document.

It’s not just a translation. It’s a “translation + adaptation and feedback” approach.

I’ve used it with excellent results. Michel Gauthier, too.

As for deciding, from the start, to write completely different documents, it’s not usually practical. And I think it’s rarely necessary.

Yes, there are some differences between anglophone and francophone audiences; but there are also huge differences between an East Coast dentist and a West Coast fisherman, even if they’re both anglophones. Yet, they have enough in common that one document is usually enough.

About when to send a text to translation:

What often works best, I think: waiting until the original text is basically finished… but making sure it’s still possible to make changes.

That’s because the translator will often ask questions that will help you clarify the original. And if you go through a “translation + adaptation/feedback” process, then any changes made to the French could inspire changes to the English, too.

4. Examples: translation in plain language projects

Here are 3 different scenarios.

1. Customer service letters at Clarica

We applied the “translation + adaptation” process quite a few times. So when an important letter came back from translation, I would gather a few good people together, and we’d make the text more reader friendly. It worked beautifully.

Note: By the way… I’m sure this idea is making a few people cringe. We’ve all had baaad experiences with bilingual employees “improving” a translation…  But it does work very well if you have strong, knowledgeable writers and experts working on the revision.

Note 2: I had management approval to rework customer service documents that way. I was in a good position to do that, since I was working at improving the quality of French in the company. (Plus, by that time, I had spent 6 years in the translation department and worked on the company’s “complex complaints” team, all valuable experience.)

2. Simplifying a huge insurance contract at Desjardins Financial Security

Four people (2 writers, 1 lawyer, 1 actuary) worked on this project on top of their other responsibilities for 2 years. They were all knew to plain language and learning as they went. They focused on rewriting the original French; and as they were learning, they would make decisions that impacted sections they had already worked on. So they had to go back again and again.

When the texts were ready for English translation, they were sent to an external translator. He worked very closely with a member of the team (one of the writers, also a translator), to create the English version.

3. Ville de Montréal, “Charter of rights and responsibilities”

Montréal is very multicultural. The charter is all about how residents can live well together, be good neighbours to each other.

If I remember well, the city first created the English and French versions of the charter.

Then, to create the other versions (Arabic, Italian, etc.), the translation team would meet with cultural groups. They would discuss the values mentioned in the charter, see how they fit with people in that community, learn about similar values in their culture, etc. These conversations helped create a text that would make sense to people in that community.

It was a collaborative process.

(I must say, the charter isn’t exactly in plain language… But the efforts the team made to talk with the audience and find out what would make sense to them, that’s very much a “plain language” approach.)

5. Short conclusion: the writing process

Something you’ve probably noticed…

Representations of the writing process tend to be all neat and orderly: first this step, then this one, then this other one…

It’s a lot messier in real life! Instead of a straight line, the real visual would have a lot of back and forth, running in circles, zigzagging, waiting, jumping back… 😉

The “translation + adaptation” I mentioned would probably look like an offshoot from the main process. And it would probably link back to the writing process of the original text at some point, when changes made to the translation inspire changes in the original.

That real picture would be rather messy… but fascinating!

—Dominique Joseph
(translator, clear communication specialist, fan of good processes)
July 2014