Top leadership in Washington hardly valued clear, concise or correct communication over the last few years. Presidential musings routinely veered into indecipherability. “I call it the black hole,” said Annetta Cheek, a former bureaucrat in her mid-70s who helped launch the government’s plain language movement. But the deep state of Plain Language persevered. A loose network of jargon critics, crusaders for clarity and gatekeepers of grammar, they regularly invoke the little-known Plain Writing Act signed into law early in the Obama era. As they do, they nudge a government predisposed to over-complication and incomprehensibility toward making sense. Advertisement