Plain Language Action News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Employees, and their bosses, need to know their audience and use the right tone and terms for the occasion.

Casual, digital-influenced language is crashing the old formal structures of workplace communication

A recent study found that formality in government communications increases engagement, but does this idea contradict the best practice of using plain language to make government more accessible?

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 t...

Jargon critics, crusaders for clarity and gatekeepers of grammar nudge a government predisposed to over-complication and incomprehensibility toward making sense. They stubbornly drag the bureaucracy along, using methods that are generally subtle and gentle but occasionally blunt.