Plain Language: A Health Strategy

Thanks to Dr Aniruddha Malpani, MD, The Patients Doctor of Bombay for bringing this brief to our attention. The full report is very useful:

Plain Language: A Promising Strategy for Clearly Communicating Health Information and Improving Health Literacy

"Conclusion:
Plain language makes health information easier to understand Our nation faces an enormous challenge to ensure that people with low health literacy skills have the opportunity to receive and understand the health information they need to make sound decisions. Limited health literacy is a complex communication and information problem that requires multiple approaches and methods to realize improvement.
This brief examines plain language and its contribution to improving health literacy.
Research and experience demonstrate that plain language is an essential element of clear communication. Although more research is needed to determine the most effective techniques to communicate clearly with all consumers and patients, existing research shows that plain language is a promising strategy to address the challenge."

Raise-A-Reader Day: Thursday, Sept. 27

Plain Language measure sets guidelines for tax, college aid and other forms

THonline.com
Braley bill would reduce government legalese

By MARY RAE BRAGG TH staff writer

Dubuque's congressman, Rep. Bruce Braley, introduced a bill last week that would require the federal government to communicate in easy-to-understand language.

"Anyone who's done their own taxes knows the headache of trying to understand pages and pages of confusing forms and instructions," Braley said. "There is no reason why the federal government can't write these forms and other public documents in a way we can all understand."

The Plain Language in Government Communications Act, HR 3584, sets guidelines for documents like tax returns, college aid applications and forms from the Department of Veteran Affairs. The bill's guidelines instruct document authors to use short, simple words; use "you" and other pronouns when speaking to the reader; use short sentences and paragraphs; and avoid legal, foreign and technical jargon.

The bill, which has two Democratic and two Republican cosponsors, was referred to the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, one of the committees Braley serves on.

According to a report appearing on www.plainlanguage.gov, "Plain talk" can result in higher revenue for the government instituting it.

An official in Washington state says their Department of Revenue estimates it has collected about $5 million in additional revenue since rewriting one explanatory tax collection letter in 2003.

Personality and Style Affects Communication

As year-end nears, the time is now to clear out [publish] all those drafts in my toolbox.

Law Practice Today

Building Blocks: The Interpersonal Communication Toolbox

By Stewart Levine

September 2007

Instruments Demonstrate Differences

There are many different instruments that reveal style differences in different aspects of communication. They include:

• PSI - Personal Styles Inventory
• DISC - (i.e., Dominant, Influencer, Steady, Conscientious)
• MBTI - Myers Briggs
• Influence Inventory
• Relationship Strategies
• Thomas Killian Conflict Style

These instruments serve a few very useful purposes. They make us aware of the different way people receive and deliver information. That usually explains why we are challenged communicating with particular individuals. That enables us to use what we learn about our audiences so we can communicate more effectively.

Using an instrument for a team or work-group and making people aware of the styles of others is a very useful tool for developing effectiveness in communicating to particular individuals. The instruments reveal preferences along a continuum of opposite styles. They shed light on why you may be having difficulty communicating with particular individuals. They provide information and strategies on the best way to communicate with people of the opposite or the same styles.

They deliver the message that although we tend to have preferences because of our experience, how we developed or our genetic inclination, we have the capacity to consciously chose to “flex” our style so we can be more effective in dealing with people who have different preferences. “Flexing” is the way we develop our communication muscles!

Target Crime with Literacy

September is National Literacy Month and the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police (CACP) is targeting crime with literacy. Raising literacy rates in the community contributes to
reducing crime and lowering re-offending.

The CACP’s Crime Prevention Committee launched their "Literacy and the Police in Canada" project in March 2007. The project aims to increase police awareness of literacy challenges faced by members of the community and encourage police involvement in community literacy initiatives.

The CACP is developing learning materials to increase police effectiveness in
communicating with those who come into contact with the law: witnesses, complainants, and
suspects.

Since the spring, a CACP Project Team has (photo at right) been working closely with an Advisory Committee that includes police, literacy organizations, governments and plain-language experts. One of the first tasks is to hold focus groups with police, to obtain input on appropriate roles for the police to play, challenges they may face, and effective practices
when dealing with literacy issues.

The first focus groups are being hosted by the Toronto Police Service on Wednesday,
September 12, 2007. Sessions in Halifax, Vancouver and Thunder Bay will follow.

According to Statistics Canada, literacy is defined as the ability to understand and use printed
information in daily activities.

Research in North America tells us that criminal offenders have lower average literacy levels than the general population. Neighbourhoods with lower literacy levels have higher crime rates. Witnesses with low literacy need help to communicate effectively in giving a report or testifying. Literacy programs in prisons have resulted in positive outcomes (maintaining employment) and reduced rates of re-offending.

Intelligence Analyst on Plain Language

If you think this is a cheap shot, then I am sorry--that you think it.

It seems odd that the use of plain language is worthy of comment--by an intelligence analyst. Even more reason that plain language should be the norm...

"At times, bin Laden speaks directly to Americans, using plain language that "appears to be crafted in a way as to be understood by the average person on the street in Europe or in the US," said intelligence analyst Ben Venzke."

From an AFP report

I Remember You; Oh, Excuse Me.

Negative sentence constructions are difficult for people to process. Their minds first construct the positive version, then reverse it. Like teen-agers who used to accomplish this verbally in this style: I love school, not!

A fairly recent study now suggests another reason to avoid the negative: long term memory loses the negative and remembers the positive construction.

From the Washington Post,

Persistence of Myths Could Alter Public Policy Approach

"Experiments by Ruth Mayo, a cognitive social psychologist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, also found that for a substantial chunk of people, the "negation tag" of a denial falls off with time. Mayo's findings were published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 2004.

"If someone says, 'I did not harass her,' I associate the idea of harassment with this person," said Mayo, explaining why people who are accused of something but are later proved innocent find their reputations remain tarnished. "Even if he is innocent, this is what is activated when I hear this person's name again.

"If you think 9/11 and Iraq, this is your association, this is what comes in your mind," she added. "Even if you say it is not true, you will eventually have this connection with Saddam Hussein and 9/11."

Mayo found that rather than deny a false claim, it is better to make a completely new assertion that makes no reference to the original myth. Rather than say, as Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) recently did during a marathon congressional debate, that "Saddam Hussein did not attack the United States; Osama bin Laden did," Mayo said it would be better to say something like, "Osama bin Laden was the only person responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks" -- and not mention Hussein at all."

Read the full article here.

Business Communication

Business Communication Headline News provides news about communication for instructors of business communication. It is a companion to three college texts on business communication.

I have find it very helpful, and at the moment I have ten items sitting in my blog feed waiting for me to have the time to read them carefully. To clean up my feed, I am sharing these items with you. I think you will find this site very interesting.

Business English Grammar Lessons These lessons will be useful to anyone teaching business English. Read the original story here If the above link is broken, view our cached copy instead.

10 Icebreakers for Meetings Divide the meeting participants into groups of four or five people by having them number off. (You do this because people generally begin a meeting by sitting with the people they already know best.) Read the original story here If the above link is broken, view our cached copy instead.

Create Effective Charts with PowerPoint Graphs (called charts in PowerPoint) are an important part of many presentations, especially ones with financial data. In this tip, I include the basics for creating a readable, effective graph. Read the original story here If the above link is broken, view our cached copy instead.

How to Commmunicate about Change Richmond.com One of the perennial issues in many organizations is how to communicate about change. It’s a problem that appears with such regularity that "change communication" (and "change management" for that matter) has become a cliché. Because, after all–let’s say it together–the only constant is change. Read the original story here If the above link is broken, view our [...]

The 8 Intelligence Types: Which Type Are You? Do you think IQ tests provide the best indication of intelligence? You may be surprised to know that some scientists don’t think so. As a matter of fact, one scientist came up with a new theory about intelligence more than twenty years ago. Dr. Howard Gardner of Harvard University proposed that people were much more [...]

Test Yourself: Body Language and Persuasion Facial expressions can be good predictors of what the person you are persuading is thinking, but it requires fairly significant study. Body language and facial expressions when combined offer an even better picture of how your message is being received. Many people believe that they are good interpreters of body language and facial expressions, [...]

Ten Commandments of Blog and Wiki Etiquette Fueled in large part by the usercentric Web 2.0 trend, the Internet has evolved considerably as a communications platform, offering people innovative means for keeping in touch and sharing knowledge instantly with others across the Blogs and wikis, which enable folks to broadcast their thoughts to the Web at large and to collaborate on documents, [...]

Business Writing for Idioms There’s a kind of idiom that can cause problems. This kind of idiom means “the characteristic ways in which a language says things.” Every language on the planet has its own ways of saying certain things; when transferred to other languages, these “ways of saying things” sound downright weird. In English, for instance, we [...]

The Lazy Person’s Guide to Online Competitive Research Discovering who is linking to a site and clicking to read the associated commentary is a great competitive research technique . . . Read the original story here If the above link is broken, view our cached copy instead.

Research from McKinsey Reveals the Importance Organizations Place on Change Communication Research from McKinsey reveals that clear and creative leadership communication around company objectives is a fundamental component for successful organizational change. Read the original story here If the above link is broken, view our cached copy instead.

Res Ipsa Loquitor

Scientist makes funny--it can happen

Guide to translating scientific papers into plain English.

This post by T. Ryan Gregory offers a guide to scientific bafflegab.