Editor
In 2017, in the middle of my PhD program, I embarked on a little side project to interview leaders of the plain language movement in Canada who were active between 1980 and 1995. I chose that window because it’s within what my former publishing prof John Maxwell called the internet’s historical rain shadow: not old enough to be considered interesting and thus worthy of being documented online but not new enough that it would automatically exist online. Without a concerted effort to fill that gap in our history, information about those events could be lost forever.
Between 2017 and 2019, I completed interviews with twelve key Canadian figures in plain language—not just plain language practitioners but people who advanced plain language culturally, politically, or socially. My intent was to make available both the audio file and a transcript of each interview for interested community members, historians, and other researchers to consume, analyze, and study. But my progress on processing the interviews stalled: First, I had to focus on writing my dissertation, then the COVID pandemic hit, and then I joined the Plain Language Technical Committee to create a plain language standard for Accessibility Standards Canada—a commitment that monopolized any time I had to volunteer for plain language advocacy.
So, to mix metaphors, this project has been gnawing at the back of my brain for nearly a decade, boiling dry on the back burner. Since Accessibility Standards Canada’s plain language standard was published in fall 2025 and I no longer had that committee work taking up my time, I resolved at the start of 2026 to return my attention to this oral history and honour the voices of the people who graciously took time to speak with me—especially because we have since lost one of them, Christine Mowat.
Truth be told, beyond simple burnout, a major reason I procrastinated for so long was that the longer I left the audio files, the more embarrassed I was at how long I’d left them, and the more averse I was to opening them. The sound quality was generally heinous, since I used an old digital recorder and met many interviewees in public places with a good amount of background noise. As a result, when I tried using the speech-to-text programs available at the time to create draft transcripts, they were wildly inaccurate and incomplete, which meant that I had to do hours of editing and listen to my own horrendous voice in the process. And so much time had passed that the contemporaneous notes I’d scrawled as I was interviewing made little sense to me.
Anyway, enough excuses. I’m cleaning up the transcripts and am reaching out to interviewees to reaffirm their consent for me to share these conversations. And now that bad actors can use voice samples to perpetrate scams, I’ve decided to publish the transcripts only. I’m aiming to post two to four transcripts a month, starting April 15. Some interviewees also provided supporting documents, and if copyright is not an issue, I’ll try to recreate these resources and post them alongside the interview transcripts.
These Canadian plain language champions have given me permission to post their interviews (I’ll add to this list as I hear from more people, and I’ll link to the transcripts when they become available):
- Michelle Black
- Jan Catano and Gwen Davies
- Michel Gauthier
- Nicole Fernbach
- Kate Harrison Whiteside
- Sally McBeth
- Christine Mowat
- Cheryl Stephens
- Nicole Watkins Campbell
Of course, even if all twelve interviewees consent to making their transcripts available, I recognize that a dozen people does not a movement make. I know many other people played crucial roles in Canada’s plain language movement between 1980 and 1995. If you’re among them, and you’d like to be interviewed for this oral history, please contact me. Some folks I tried to reach when I was actively recruiting interviewees declined to participate at the time or never got back to me, but I’d be happy to speak with anyone who’s reconsidered or who now has time that wasn’t available nine years ago. These days, being able to hop on a Zoom call from anywhere and automatically generate a transcript of the conversation will mean a much shorter turnaround time from interview to post—I promise!
I’ll let other researchers synthesize themes and glean meaning from the transcripts when they’re posted. But as I revisited the interviews, I was reminded of just how incredibly generous and lovely the members of this community are. They care deeply about people’s fundamental right to the information they need to make essential decisions affecting their lives, and they are invested in equity and accessibility. They give their time and expertise in an often hostile funding environment to bring likeminded people together and uplift good work. Most of all, they can imagine a better world and are actively taking steps to move us toward it.
I want to send a special shoutout to Dominique Joseph, without whom this project would be a pathetic shell of what it has become. Dominique was instrumental in connecting me with many interviewees, particularly in the eastern part of the country, and I owe her an enormous debt of gratitude for her enthusiasm, support, and patience.