Want to beat the
bureaucrats? We may be able to help.
The Horror Show – awful official
documents
Telling it such as it is – involving ordinary people in plain English
Common Talk
Common
Talk is an organisation for people who are interested in plain English.
We
include, involve, and support people who:
§
feel
frustrated by complicated forms;
§
get
annoyed by wordy letters;
§
want
organisations that affect their lives to write in language they can understand.
Anyone
can get involved in Common Talk. It is not just for
professionals. But professional plain-English editors
and trainers are more than welcome to join in.
We
also welcome people who work for public bodies, utilities, or private
companies; we would like to hear your views on how to improve communications
with the public.
Our
organisation is at an early stage. All of us are
volunteers. We want to improve our website as soon as
we can.
Want to beat the bureaucrats? We may be able to help.
Have
you received an unhelpful letter or form? Tell us
about it. We’ll do what we can to help. You might want us to try to explain what it means, or to
put you in touch with someone else who can. You might
want us to complain about it for you. Or you might
just want to tell us about it.
We
won’t do anything with the information you send us without your permission –
we’ll leave you in control.
We
won’t give out your name or e-mail address. We won’t
store information about you. And we won’t send you any
spam.
Tell
us about the document you have received. It could be a
form, a letter, a report, or a bill. Send us the full
text of the document if you can. If you can’t, just
give us the gist. Remember to say why you found it
unhelpful and how you would like us to help.
Send us an e-mail at Common Talk
Our e-mail group
Our
e-mail group, also called Common Talk, is
for anyone who is interested in plain English. In our
e-mail group, we:
§
share
stories about useless letters, forms, and reports;
§
exchange
tips for outsmarting organisations that communicate badly with the people
they’re supposed to serve;
§
listen
to people who are finding official documents difficult to understand; and
§
share
information about places that can help individuals who are on the receiving end
of poor communications.
You can join the Common Talk e-mail group by sending a blank
e-mail to:
commontalk-subscribe@topica.com
The
e-mail group Common Talk has no rules. But it helps to
remember a few things.
§
Most
of our members are from
§
We
have some members who don’t want to give out too much information about
themselves. Some fear reprisals from organisations
they’ve told us about. Others do not want to talk
about their employers or clients. So please be understanding
if you ask someone a question about themselves and they don’t reply.
§
Some
people find it daunting to write to an e-mail group, especially the first time
they do it. Please take serious questions and comments
seriously, especially if you don’t know the person that has sent them in.
Common
Talk was set up by Sarah Margetts. Sarah has been
involved in local politics for the past 15 years. She
has seen the problems that many people have with unhelpful letters and forms. Currently, Sarah is a co-ordinator of
To get in touch with Sarah, send an e-mail to: e.sarah@ntlworld.com
or write to her at:
+44 (0)1865 437111
Other
supporters of Common Talk include:
§
Stan
Taylor:
Stan says:
“This is a very important group. I have read (and probably written) unintelligible English
for 50 years. It is time we started to talk clearly to
one another.”
§
§
Stephen
Tall:
The
Horror Show – awful official documents
Our
first example is an extract from a document by
The
extract here describes efforts to provide faster Internet access.
The first phase of the Project has primarily
focused on the roll-out to schools and libraries in order to meet the timetable
commitments attached to the funding streams. The OCN team is confident that by September this year,
connection of virtually all the County’s schools and libraries will have been
achieved.
The costs of implementation have been higher
than expected for a number of reasons, principally: variations in schools’
existing local area networks; conversions of existing facilities to preserve
continuity of service from existing suppliers; and electricity supply problems
at both County Hall and Macclesfield House. It was
also found necessary to enhance the level of support and training for the
migration of schools to the new network.
Subsequent phases of
the project encompass three main areas:
(i)
Replacement of Oxfordshire County Council’s internal Wide Area Network;
(ii) Joint
e-government projects with the District Councils and other (public sector)
partner organisations;
(iii)
Use by communities, rural Small and Medium Sized enterprises, and the viability
of being able to offer Broadband connection to domestic subscribers, making
Oxfordshire a truly "wired county".
If
you feel that this extract is hard to follow, please send an e-mail to
Telling
it such as it is – involving ordinary people in plain English
Sarah Margetts, who set up Common Talk, talks
about making plain English meaningful to ordinary people – and about making
ordinary people meaningful to the plain-English movement.
Many
of the people I talk to don’t know what plain English is. Is
it swearing at people? Is it when they give you an
easy-to-read leaflet instead of the information you really want? Is it when the government says you’ll get “more money”?
In
fact, many of the people I talk to don’t care what plain English is. They just want things to get better. They
want their houses repaired; they want somewhere they can park their car; they
want their rubbish collecting – and they want it collecting on the right day.
When
these people don’t get what they want, they do what most people do when they
don’t get what they want. They get angry.
Sometimes
people don’t get what they want because there’s no money. Often,
it’s because the people who run things spend more time networking and penning strategic
documents than putting things right.
But,
sometimes they don’t get what they want because it’s difficult to lobby for
repairs to their homes when the reports don’t tell them where the money comes
from. Sometimes it’s because they haven’t had the
patience to read the small print on the form they’ve got to fill in if they
want to park their car. And sometimes it’s because they
haven’t had a leaflet saying the rubbish-collection dates are about to change.
When
things go wrong, most people don’t care why they’ve gone wrong. They don’t distinguish unhelpful communications from all
the other things that don’t help.
They
just want the whole lot sorting out.
If
you tell them you want to bring people in to work on communications, they say,
“Another lot of bloody consultants! What good have
consultants ever done us?”
And
they do have a point.
To
find out what ordinary people think about official English, you have to listen to
their suspicion about plain English.
And
you have to help them with the other problems that go with official English.
They
may come to you with a bundle of letters that no-one can understand. Often the letters will be replies to letters of their own asking
to be moved out of a house that’s too small. They
don’t want you to get the letters rewritten. They want
you to get them moved.
But,
once you’ve tried to do that, they’ll tell you exactly what they think of
official letters.
They’ll
tell you they want people to spell their names right. They’ll
tell you that what they want to hear first – at the start of the letter – is
whether they’ll get housed. They’ll say they want to
hear that before they’re told about all the deliberations that have gone into
the decision. And, if they’re working 60 hours a week for
different employers, they’ll tell you they take exception to letters saying
that housing officers are busy people.
They’ll
say it’s a hassle to have to go back, with children in tow, to the same office –
three times – to prove that they’re them, because the claim form didn’t say what
proof of identity was. In any case, they’ll point out,
they’ve been going into the same office for eight years. “Surely
the people there remember my name by now?”
When
they’re at the end of their tether, they’ll say they could run things better
themselves.
And
usually they’re right.
But
once their latest crisis is over, they’ll be witty as well as perceptive about official
letters and forms. They’ll say that a “joint
operation” by highways and planning sounds like a way of jumping health-service
queues. And they’ll translate euphemistic reports
about their circumstances with glee.
And
once you’ve taken the trouble to look at it their way, they might change their
minds about plain English. They might say they want to
be involved too.
But
they’ll want it to be on their terms.
They’ll
say that if they shop a useless letter, they want you to do something about the
whole thing. They’ll want to tell you how confusing it
was but they’ll also want to tell you how it’s going to affect their lives.
They
say they’ll stop giving you information if you use it for purposes they haven’t
agreed to. They won’t thank you for publicising a
letter without their permission. If they do say you can
publicise a letter, they want to be in control of the publicity.
Sometimes
they’ll want the public credit for getting an organisation into trouble. Other times, they’ll want shielding from the intrusions
that publicity can bring.
Certainly,
they won’t thank you if you don’t thank them. If you
get the letter replaced with a better one, they want to hear that something has
changed because they went to the effort of telling you about it. That is the only thanks they want.
And
if you can’t do anything about the letter, they don’t want another long letter
that pretends to be an apology but is really just self-justification and
self-explanation. They want you to say you’re sorry. That is the only apology they want.
