EditorThis is a near-verbatim transcript of an in-person interview I did with Sally McBeth in Toronto, ON, on June 29, 2017, as part of my project to compile an oral history of the plain language movement in Canada between 1980 and 1995. Although the transcript reflects her views at the time, those views might have evolved since the interview took place.
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SM: My perspective comes very much out of adult basic literacy. I think your first question was “How did you get involved?” I—kind of like Martin Cutts—come out of community journalism. I was the assignments editor for a community newspaper for several years in the late ’70s and early ’80s. And after the newspaper closed down, I got a position with an organization called East End Literacy. East End has renamed itself the Centre for Community Learning and Development because it’s branched out into a lot of other kinds of adult education, in addition to basic literacy. But at that time it was grassroots, run out of the top floor of an old library building downtown in the East End. And the organization was maybe 4 or 5 years old at that point—and very much interested in developing learning materials that were based on the experiences of people who were in the program. And because I had a journalism background and because I had been an adult literacy tutor—I was trained in that—I was hired to coordinate the student publication program. And so we would develop little books like this, and I pulled this one out for you in particular, because Working Together is all about… these are all storyboarded with the students acting out the parts, and it’s basically stories that they had told each other that we just really simplified so that it would function as an adult basic reader. But everyone in this student meeting is talking about experiences that they had with really difficult language that they were dealing with in their everyday life.
IC: Mm-hm.
SM: So you can see Carol’s had to sign a lease, and she needed to get help with that. These are all online somewhere else with the National Adult Literacy Database, in their archive, which I believe is still accessible even though NALD was shut down by the Harper Government a few years ago. And here Mario’s talking about getting an offer in the mail and getting sucked into a contract where he ends up with a whole bunch of magazine subscriptions that he didn’t want because he didn’t understand what he was reading and didn’t understand what he signed.
So people were always telling us stories about things like that as we worked through other issues. I mean, we worked on all kinds of student publications on all kinds of topics. This one was about menstruation and female sexuality, and there was a whole series of booklets and workbooks and things like that that we were developing.
But what really struck me coming out of journalism was this issue of people having to read things that a lawyer had probably written and only a lawyer could understand. And if I as a really highly educated person was having trouble understanding the language, how could they possibly imagine that a general audience would. And so we started doing training in the community, and this notice of termination is one of the examples of the kind of notice they were getting from public housing landlords. So you can see, “We hereby give you notice to deliver a… vacant possession of the premises known as 14…” Well, it’s really, really highly legalistic language. This is basically—come on over here, you can look at it.
So this is a letter that a guy named Bernie brought in who had very basic literacy skills. He was living in public housing, he’s getting what really looks like an eviction notice, and really when you parse this, what you find out is that he has failed to furnish his annual income and family unit household review form. In other words, there was a complicated form, he didn’t know how to fill it out, he neglected it, and now he’s getting evicted. So that was the situation that people were in. I’m going way back to the late ’70s and early ’80s. This one is dated ’91, but we were seeing stuff like that long, long before that.
And so we began to realize in the literacy program that maybe we needed to look at what we were doing in two ways. Number one was to help people to improve their reading and writing skills so that they could deal with all of these everyday literacy tasks. But the other thing we needed to do was to advocate for language that would be accessible to people. And in addition, that accessibility issue wasn’t just affecting people who were in adult literacy programs. It probably had a much broader application.
So we started looking for ways to train. And Martin Cutts kind of came out of the same kind of community journalism background. And you know the story of Martin and Chrissie and how they got started with their advocacy work—it’s in the history that I wrote, so you can pick that one up there. So we knew about that, and we knew that Ruth Baldwin in Ottawa was collecting material from the British plain language program—which actually launched much earlier and had a lot of support from the BBC in the 1970s. So Ruth was collecting those materials and putting together training modules and so on, and I was working closely with a brilliant tutor named Tannis Atkinson, who is on your list of people to talk to, I’m sure. And Tannis and I got permission to go to Ottawa and train with Ruth, and we did that I think it was early in 1984. I’m not too certain about the dates, but somewhere around in there, And it just felt to me like the training just adhered to a lot of principles of good journalism that I knew, coming from that background, and that we could somehow apply that in the community.
So we started developing training that we could take out to other agencies in our catchment area initially. And we just did that sporadically based on requests, or if we’d get a small grant, for example, we’d go out and train. So that was just kind of locally.
And that changed—and actually… but that answers the question of how did I get involved in the plain language movement.
A lot of other people in the Toronto literacy scene we’re also very interested in this issue, and so the Metro Toronto Movement for Literacy sort of helped us to form kind of a working group, and Tannis and I would get together with people like Betty-Ann Lloyd who was doing her postgraduate studies out of OAC and was very involved in this topic.
So yeah. And so we just started basically talking it up. So I guess at that point you could have called it a movement. And trying to connect up with other people. And you’re gonna be speaking with Cheryl Stephens, and she was the one who just really started connecting people with the first plain language conferences in Winnipeg, and I believe there was one in Texas during that period. I didn’t actually attend those—we didn’t have the money to send me to those or anything like that at that point. But we were just kind following along.
Yeah. That was your first question.
OK, so that’s what inspired me to get involved in this. Your next question was, “How would you compare the movement in Canada to the movement in other places around the world?”
I would say in Australia and Britain, there was really strong early support from people in quite high places in the legal community, and that would be a big difference. In Canada not so much—although there is now. I mean, you’ll see all kinds of really prominent public legal figures calling out—crying out—for clear language in the law. Like instructions to juries and in the way decisions are written and all of those things. So that’s very much happened. It wasn’t happening so much in Canada at that point. I would say what distinguished the Canadian clear language movement was that it had a really strong adult literacy base. At least from where I was sitting. Although I know Cheryl had legal education and was coming at it from another angle. But also with a pretty strong community base.
So the important events—politically, socially, or culturally—that influenced the early days of the movement in Canada. When I thought about this question, Iva, it seemed to me that in Canada it just came out of a lot of grassroots activity that had started up in the ’60s and ‘70s at a lot of community-based organizations. And that tended to give it the feeling of a movement, because it was connected to those organizations. So, for example, advocacy for things like legal aid and legal education which led to CLIC, the Community Legal Information Centre—are you going to talk to Gwen Davies? Great. And she’ll tell you all about that. So that was going on. Community Legal Education Ontario was getting started up, and they very much had, you know, a clear language focus because they were basically writing information in clear language for all aspects of the law for people—and still do.
Yeah, so I’m not sure how far back they go. So if you want me to connect you up with anybody at CLEO if you don’t already, let me know.
The community-based adult literacy programs I mentioned, the community-based health clinics, and the Canadian Public Health Association got involved quite early in advocacy for clear language. And then there were neighbourhood information posts and libraries and other street-level organizations like that who were running tax clinics, and there you get into issues of financial literacy and understanding things like income tax. There was some very early work done on the income tax return, actually. It got revamped during that period, and I can’t remember who all was involved in that. And I know that David Berman in Ottawa was involved in a rewrite of unemployment legislation early on.
So things were happening in Ottawa that I wasn’t part of but that I’m sure you’re gonna hear about. And because adult literacy saw itself very much as a movement—as something that needed to a lot of advocacy work and promotion and so on, and because clear language was so closely associated with it, you know, it all kind of felt like a movement. Which is going to bring me to “Where do I see the movement today?“—which is that I don’t think there’s a movement in Canada today. [Laughs] Anyway, so that page…
And then, you know, Christine [Mowat]—it’s moving into the private sector—even organizations like Christine’s, which was very much a successful private enterprise, but Christine has got like a very public-minded and progressive focus. She was a teacher in Africa for many years—in Kenya, I believe. And Cheryl had started Plain Language Wizardry. So these were small private consultancies—or fairly large in Christine’s case—but very much with an advocacy focus, and coming out of grassroots experiences.
The labour movement was supportive in the mid-’90s. Not so much in the ‘80s that I can recall, but I do know that we rewrote the collective agreement for St. Christopher House in 1997, and by then at the national level, people like Tamara Levine were working with the Canadian Labour Congress. But we’re going more into the later 1990s period, and I think you were more interested in what was going on in the earlier years. But eventually the labour movement was kind of gearing up to get involved in it, but it was happening more at the local level, and it took a while to percolate up.
And really the seminal event we will get to when I answer the next question—I’ll try and stay organized for you. [Laughs]
OK, so my focus stayed on adult literacy with occasional clear language work and working with the MTML working group on promoting clear language until 1992. And everything changed in 1992 for our organization because at that time adult literacy organizations were realizing that a lot of the funding they worked really hard to secure from government was going to disappear. In the 1990s, there was a huge provincial debt, and we knew there was going to be regime change and that with it would come really serious cuts to public funding. So lots of organizations were looking for ways to launch social enterprises that might bring in some extra money. And we felt that the strength we had was in our expertise in clear language, so we applied to the Government of Ontario, which at that time was still the [Bob] Rae government, and they had a program called JOCA—Jobs Ontario Community Action or something like that—but under that program we were able to persuade them that they should fund us to do a feasibility study and develop a marketing plan for launching a clear language consultancy out of our organization, which was a nonprofit charity, as a social enterprise that would help to pay costs and possibly generate a surplus that could go back into the programs.
So we started planning for that in 1992, and that started pretty well absorbing all of my time, because I was involved in basically doing everything. And it’s quite possible… We launched it in I think ’94, and I think probably Clear Language and Design—it was the first and possibly the only clear language service that was launched out of a nonprofit as social enterprise that actually succeeded in breaking even and creating surpluses that could go back into the organization. I don’t know for sure. I think that’s kind of our accomplishment that we’re especially proud of. Because that was your question.
Yeah, ’cause we’re on to your question about “What were your main roles and activities in the language movement?” So that’s the big accomplishment—would be developing that model and making it happen. In terms of the movement, I think it kind of falls outside of your time frame.
IC: It’s not rigid, so feel free to elaborate.
SM: OK. I mean Cheryl, and Kate, and, oh, I forget the name of the other wonderful woman who was involved really early on. It’s in the history document that I wrote, so you’ll see it there. They had been just amazing at organizing these early plain language conferences, but they tended to be quite Canadian based or Canada–US based in the case of the Texas one. So that part of network was happening thanks to them, and the Plain Language Association International now existed because Cheryl had launched a kind of a chat list, which had enabled people from all over the world to start talking to one another. And what they were talking about was “Where should we hold a plain language conference?” And it looked to me like this was an opportunity to make this organization truly international, because I don’t think it really was before just because we didn’t have the technology to communicate as regularly, and it’s pretty hard to organize an international conference unless you’ve got a substantial financial base. But because we were housed in an adult literacy incorporated program and reasonably well established, we were able to apply for a government grant to host a conference, so in partnership with PLAIN, with Plain Language Association International, East End Literacy hosted the 2002 conference here in Toronto, and we specified in our grant application that we wanted additional funding to make sure we could pay for people to come from all over the world—as many people as we could possibly get—to see if we could truly get people in the room. So that’s why that keynote address that you’re reading was so special to me and to everybody, because a lot of those people had never been in the same room together before. And it really felt at that conference like the organization had launched itself in an international way, and it continued from strength to strength from there.
So that, I would say, is a big accomplishment in Clear Language and Design because we were kind of the prime movers in that. Michelle Black worked really hard with me on that. She’s now freelance—a freelance plain language consultant. One of many people I’ve trained who’s freelancing. Yeah.
So that’s the accomplishments. Your next question was “What were the biggest challenges in the plain language movement before the mid-1990s?” And my answer to that would be the lack of a research base. It was really hard to persuade people that this was a problem without a research base. And that all changed when Statistics Canada partnered and took the lead—and you know all about this by talking to Michel [Gauthier]—on developing the National Adult Literacy Survey. And at that time, Peter Calamai interviewed me. He was really, really interested in this. He was with the Star at that point. He was the science writer for the Star. And he had me measure the readability of various daily newspapers and other documents and publish this kind of, you know, “Hall of Shame” report of how very difficult—when you actually measure how many years of education roughly you would need to read a document. So, kind of publicly shamed several government and other organizations for just how difficult things were. And because now we had survey data, we could say, “Look, this is where large groups of people—not just little… not just that little 15% of functionally illiterate people but large, much larger groups of people, are affected by the clear language issue, and we had the data to prove it. That made a huge difference.
And so that was the stumbling block in the early years and IALS [International Adult Literacy Survey] really did a lot to change that. And it really did a lot to make the government pay attention—that was when the National Literacy Secretariat came into being, and a lot of other supports at both the federal and the provincial level. So that was one big challenge, and this is also connected with research base—testing. So when Penny Goldsmith and her group published this [Reaching your readers: A fieldtesting guide for community groups] in the early ’90s—have you’ve got a copy of that?
IC: No, I don’t.
SM: Oh, you can take one. I’ve got several.
IC: Oh, thank you.
SM: It was the first time I had seen a documented methodology of how to test comprehension—not just how to measure it using the tools we had, such as the Fry graph at that time. We were starting to learn how to use automated tools, but it was pretty early in the computer age, so we were doing it by hand. We were counting syllables and words—it was a very time consuming.
But that’s only, you know, that’s just one metric for measuring reading difficulty, and what this group was doing was working with people to measure comprehension of documents and then documenting the methodology for doing that, which everyone started to use. So that… it just vastly professionalized the whole field, I think. And gradually what this became was usability, because we started connecting up with… you know, by the late ’90s we were very much connected with the Society for Technical Communication and their usability interest group and all of those methods of testing how people read things, how people use manuals, all of… And a great deal of work was being done at the Document Center in the US as well that we were learning a lot from, so. And Karen Schriver’s book [Dynamics in Document Design] is around here somewhere.
Yeah. So, yeah, I would say those were the challenges—you know, convincing people of the importance and what we knew we needed was the research base, and that happened very much during the ’90s.
So that’s the answer to that question. And then “How do you feel about where the movement is today?” and I think you’re talking about the Canadian plain language movement? And I don’t think there is one.
IC: [Laughs]
SM: And you’d probably hear that from my colleague Dominique Joseph also—have you spoken with Dominique?
IC: I’m in touch with her quite a bit.
SM: Actually, she put me in touch with you!
IC: Right. She says that she really started being active in about 2000, and so it was outside my window of interest, but, yeah, I’m in touch with her a fair amount.
SM: Yeah, she was with Clarica and stuff like that. But we had dinner not too long ago—we were talking about this. Because I think two things happened. Number one was, in Canada—and I’ve got very much an Ontario focus, so this could be rebalanced by what you’re hearing from the folks in the East and the West and the Prairies. But because we were tied to adult literacy and we really felt strongly that adult literacy needed public funding—it’s an educational function, it should be funded by public. It should stop being a charitable activity. And because clear language was connected to adult literacy, we tended to go… other than becoming self-supporting through the Clear Language service, we did tend to work on government-sponsored umbrella groups such as the Ontario Literacy Coalition, the Movement for Canadian Literacy, the Metropolitan Toronto Movement for Literacy—all of those umbrella-type groups were very much supporting and coordinating clear language advocacy and activity.
But during the Harper years—oh, and the National Adult Literacy Database. But during the Harper years, they were just systemically shutting all of that umbrella work down. If you weren’t providing some kind of a direct service, you weren’t getting any kind of direct federal funding, and the way it was being parcelled out provincially was also getting extremely strict. So it left very little room for any kind of public support for advocacy, and basically that just removed the infrastructure that was supporting a movement.
So I feel that in Canada it’s quite fragmented. What did stay really kind of strong and coordinated within Canada was all of our early support for the development of Plain Language Association International, and I think Ruth [Baldwin] would probably back me up on this as well, because we’ve talked about it. We tended to direct our energies—as I did with the 2002 conference, which I was organizing, like, five years in advance, so it’s in your window, sort of [laughs]—but we were really trying to build an international movement. That was really exciting. And also lent a huge amount of credibility to the work I was doing. It was really a huge business support to show that this was an international movement. So Ruth was Treasurer for many years. Plain Language Association International is actually incorporated in Canada—it’s always got to have a Canadian on the board in an executive position. And Cheryl had started the network and made the whole thing start to happen. So we tended to focus that way, as opposed to building a Canadian plain language movement.
In the US they went in a different direction. They didn’t have public support. They weren’t coming so much out of adult literacy. But they had infrastructure in the sense that so many of them were federal government employees or working out of a document design centre or had done and were now in independent consultancies. So they had built a network around that, and I guess because they were sitting in reasonably comfortable government positions, people like Annetta [Cheek] could throw a lot of her extra energy into lobbying work, with a considerable amount of support internally because they had this really strong internal network. And that enabled them to lobby for a federal law, and by that point, you know, enough people were established as clear language consultants that they could organize themselves into the Plain Language… is it called the Plain Language Center? Center for Plain Language. Yeah.
So they have a great deal of kind of strength, you know, with the Washington base, with the legislative base, and with all the experience of the people who made that happen within the US itself. Plus they’re very active in the international movement. But I would say in Canada we kind threw ourselves so much in the international movement we forgot that maybe we should be advocating within Canada itself. So I don’t see movement activity in the sense of advocacy work really happening right now. I do try to get people in Toronto who are plain language practitioners together for an informal lunch maybe twice a year or so, and lots of people come—there’s about 30 people in the network—and we talk shop, basically. And we have organized an event or two, but I’m not seeing any kind of huge momentum to, you know, let’s, you know, let’s figure out where our political supports are, let’s figure out how we can get legislation on the books, let’s figure… Because all we’ve got are scattered policies, and a lot of large public institutions have got fairly strong policy and some consumer protection agencies—the financial consumer protection movement and in the Consumer Protection Act, but it’s not coordinated in any way.
So I don’t really think that the movement is any place today. The National Adult Literacy Database is just an archive now. The National Literacy Secretariat no longer exists. The Ontario Literacy Coalition is… OK, you know all this. We’ve talked about that.
So what we’re left with… I would say the movement activity was in the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s. After that, I did lots of work with the Editors’ Association of Canada, as it was called then, you know, just speaking at conferences and events. And with the Society for Technical Communication. And so did lots of other people. So I think what we had accomplished is that… and with business communicators. So within the communications professions, what there is now and there certainly wasn’t then, is this understanding that clear language is a field and it’s a set of techniques and an approach and a methodology. It’s very much integrated into what you do no matter what your field of communications is, but it requires special training and special skills. And that is generally understood by all of the professional associations now—they know that it’s a thing, and it’s built into various accreditation systems. And there is work going on—I’m sure you’re aware—at SFU [Simon Fraser University] on getting training at the university level.
So there are lots, lots more… There were no clear language practitioners when we started out, and there are lots of them now.
And our goal, really, coming out of a community-based adult literacy program, basically running an advocacy program—we had two goals: one was to, you know, establish this as a successful fee-for-service social enterprise, and then I guess the second goal was to kind of work ourselves out of business.
And in a sense we have in that now it’s a very competitive field and it’s full of people with varying degrees of training and skill, but still, lots and lots of people practising this—and getting, I would hope, better and better at it all the time. And so even though we should have worked ourselves out of business, instead, what’s happened is the demand for clear language help has vastly increased. So our client base just doesn’t shrink. So we’re just kind of chugging along quite steadily now. But so are a whole bunch of other people, and nobody has put anybody else out of business. I mean, we do have to compete with one another for government contracts and so on and so forth. But there’s just a lot of work out there because governments and private industry and of course the whole health sector really know that this is something that they need support with. And that’s where we are now. So I wouldn’t call that a movement, I think, but it’s certainly a great deal of progress from when we started out. Yeah.
So I think—let me see. Is there anything else? No. I think that’s kind of the end of the story for me. Those are all my notes. I’m going to give those to you as well.
IC: Thank you.
SM: And this notice of termination—this horrible notice of termination. So when I explain… like, this is the presentation I give to public housing and nonprofit housing organizations. I still use this to show where we came from and then what the solutions looked like once we worked through, and then the whole workshop is about, well, how do you do that? What’s all the thinking behind making it go from that [the before example] to that [the revised version]. Yeah.
IC: So you think that now people recognize that there is a problem and that they should do something to remedy the problem when they don’t have clear language?
SM: Oh yeah. I barely market. We have a website. But people find us, or they are referred to us. So if you’re in a health organization and you’re doing a project, you’ve probably got some kind of community consultation process, and the first thing you’re gonna hear in your community consultation is “the language is too hard to understand.” And their brain goes, “Oh, let’s go get a clear language person.” And then they start googling around, and they find me or somebody else. Yeah.
In the financial sector there’s this whole thing called financial literacy now, so we’ve done quite large projects for banks, insurance companies. Do you know Rae Sands? She just retired. She might be worth talking to, and I can give you her current email address. I’m not sure how far back Rae goes, but she’s a lawyer. Before she retired she was a senior counsel with one of the big life insurance companies in Waterloo with a really strong emphasis on promoting clear language all through the insurance industry. That was what she did.
So when they get pushed by the regulators a little bit, they will come looking for clear language help. If we had an organized clear language movement, we could make this pushing happen much, much better. If we had, for example, a national award for work well done and an award for the most catastrophic… you know, and, you know, they do this in UK, they do it in the States. We don’t do it in Canada. If we did, we could create a great deal more buzz than we have. If we, you know, if we were organizing our political representatives to see this as a thing, as an issue to promote, to start thinking about “should we legislate around this,” we could be doing all those things if we had some sort of movement in place. But we’re not. So it tends to be more haphazard. Something will happen—there will be some horrible transgression around transparency that will hit the public eye, and the papers will… and then all of a sudden there’ll be a flurry of interest and activity. But you could keep making it happen if there were more of an organized movement.
IC: Mm-hm. And how do you feel about legislation? This is an issue that people seem to have very differing viewpoints on—whether it would help.
SM: Yeah. And we’ve had all kinds of discussions about it. It’s stronger than having a policy. I mean, we know there are clear language policies on the books all over the place, but policies don’t have the same kind of teeth that legislation does. But again, that depends on how the legislation gets written. So there would need to be a ton of thinking going into that.
But I do think it’s made a difference in the United States that the legislation said, “and every agency must have someone in charge of ensuring that everybody gets training that’s going to be talking with the general public.” That’s created a huge amount of education.
So I don’t know if that’s the right strategy or not. I really do think that people should be sitting around doing some strategizing.
IC: Right. Yeah.
SM: I think that would be a good thing. Yeah. So, yeah, it’s just a kind of caution around calling things movements when they’re not really moving. [Laughs]
IC: Right. And so you mentioned fragmentation and destruction of the infrastructure when the Harper government cut funding…
SM: Yeah. Yeah, you know, like, how do you pull people together? It’s hard when you’re all just kind of out there. I mean, we’ve got marvellous social networks and things like that, and people are constantly talking to each other in that way, but I kind of think to do, like, real advocacy work, you need to get people together in a room and get them figuring out strategy.
IC: And the conference… Did you do much of that kind of strategizing when you organized the conference in 2002?
SM: Um, it led to the organization having a much more coherent leadership group that was kind of continuously strategizing.
IC: But internationally, as you mentioned. Less so in Canada.
SM: Internationally. Yeah. And it brought in a whole bunch more international talent into the general leadership of the organization. And sponsoring the conference had a cachet. People could see how this is something that I can actually use to build my profile and my business in my country if I can co-sponsor with PLAIN. So it became, you know, quite a desirable thing to do, if you could get organized around it.
But yeah. And PLAIN has gone on to do great things. I mean, the fact that we’ve got so much happening educationally now has a lot to do with the PLAIN conferences.
IC: And how do you feel about the training that is being offered? Do you feel that it’s producing people with adequate skills? Do you think that we need more accreditation for legitimacy to further the movement? Or do you see things happen in a more organic kind of way?
SM: I haven’t seen a lot of other people’s trainings. I’ve seen some. I think that the quality is really, really variable. Really variable. I’ve seen some training that I really think, “Oh, that’s really not good enough.” Just in terms of how concepts are being put across. Or, I don’t know, people talking about rules that aren’t rules and things that just really make me grind my teeth. Yeah. So a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
I’ve seen some just excellent training, but the training that we do as consultants is very limited. To get a paying client to sit in a room and take a day’s training is a hard sell. We certainly do do it. Christine [Mowat of Wordsmith] always insisted that they do two days and homework and stuff like that. Because of where she was based, she was able to support that. In the ’90s and early 2000s, it was really, really hard to sell that kind of training.
But I’ve done a lot of it, and we will kind of customize to introduce people to clear language in as much time as they’ve got available to themselves, all the time pushing to take the most intensive training with the coaching as possible. so Darlene Shura and I—all through the early 2000s, which is outside [your window of interest] trained Ontario public servants through the Ontario government. They basically just made everybody take the training, and they all got a day [of training] plus an hour of individual coaching.
But that’s still a really superficial… That doesn’t make you a plain language expert. That’s a way of building awareness and getting people talking and trying and setting them on a learning curve that’s going to last their whole professional life in terms of improving their writing skills.
To actually be a clear language practitioner, I haven’t looked carefully at what’s being developed in terms of the online training so much—like, I just honestly don’t know how good they are. But my personal feeling is that what would be most effective in people learning to be clear language practitioners would be to have programs where people had to work on real projects in real time, kind of like apprenticeship programs. So you might come out of some kind of a university-based professional writing course, but… I don’t know how this could be supported, but what I really think people… the way people need to learn it is doing it in company of an experienced practitioner. Like a mentorship program.
A lot of journalism training works that way, and that’s what I know. You need somebody who’ll be really hard on you and give you deadlines and rip your work apart and put it back together with you. All that kind of stuff. I think that’s what makes good writers. When you have to go through something like that. Um, some sort of an institute or something like that.
IC: Yeah. I see what you mean about a lack of infrastructure. Just, yeah, because I’m also a member of Editors Canada, and over the past decade, we’ve built the certification program and trying to promote the profession in that way and lending it legitimacy in that way. And also getting people together so that there can be advocacy work done on behalf of the profession. And so, yeah, I do see sort of a gap there for people who specialize in clear language practice in the country.
SM: Yeah. Although I’m really, really happy about the way that Editors Canada has embraced clear language and how it’s just a part of the editorial toolkit now, which is a really good thing. When I first started talking with the association, I think people just sort of thought, “Oh, we do that anyway. Any good editor does that.”
IC: Right.
SM: And it took a while for people to realize, no it actually is a thing—it’s an extra skill. Because when I attended workshops in the ’90s at the EAC, I was surprised at what a light touch people had with anything they were editing. Like, really, really super respectful of the writer and just really… Even the substantive editing course. I’m like, this is substantive editing? ’Cause what I was doing was total rewrites. You know, your voice doesn’t matter.
IC: [Laughs]
SM: What matters is the voice we need to get this message across to meet this particularly need of the audience. And my clients weren’t having trouble getting it. And they were allowing me to do this. But Editors Canada was kind of like, “Editors don’t do that.” But at the same time, it was like, “Of course, all editors are good clear language writers.”
IC: [Laughs]
SM: So that was the disconnect. But that’s not there anymore. People like Frances Peck and Greg Ioannou and a whole bunch of other people, I think it kind of turned the attitude around. Greg and I worked really closely together on a City of Toronto project in the early 2000s as well. And we’ve trained together.
So I think everybody gets it now at Editors Canada in a way they didn’t at the beginning—which has been great. And I think the same thing is true with the Society for Technical Communication.
IC: Yeah, absolutely. I see a lot of parallels in what they do, in terms of usability, generally, and not just… They focus holistically on documents and how they affect the audience.
SM: Exactly. Yeah. So clear language is subsumed in document design—there’s no doubt about that. But it’s good that people… Somehow we’ve built enough awareness so that people just keep calling and saying, “I need a clear language expert” or “I need a plain language expert.” So it’s in the general public consciousness institutionally that this is a thing and that they need it. And that much was accomplished by the movement.
IC: But we just need more opportunities to bring people together and actually strategize for advocacy?
SM: Um, yeah. Well, you know, depending on what the goal is, if they’re, you know… People might be perfectly satisfied with how far we’ve come and what we’re doing. I don’t know. But I always really wanted to work toward integrating it into what everybody else in the communication and document design field was doing, because I think really holistically, and I didn’t want clear language to be kind of clanging up against and the, like, “No, we’re special and we’re not what you do.” Actually, it’s what we all do. But it is special in its own way, and if you don’t keep pushing the basic principles and techniques of clear language, they can get subsumed with other interests in document design. So, for example, you will lose readability features once it goes through the graphic design program because they’re not holistically thinking about readability as being a visual experience as well, you know. So we have to constantly keep talking to one another. We do need forums where we keep talking about, “Yes we all want the same thing, and here’s the clear language piece of it, and what can we learn from the pieces that you bring?” We need lots and lots of forums like that. And we need people to be educated to think like that when learning how to be professional writers and editors.
And I just have so much respect for Editors Canada and the way they’ve developed their accreditation system. And I do think it doesn’t necessarily have to be something that’s developed all on its own. It might, for example, be a special stream of accreditation through Editors Canada. That might be strategically a way to go. Let’s look for where the infrastructure exists rather than trying to build new infrastructure. Because a lot of people would agree—Dominique would agree with this—we can’t go back to “Let’s rely on government to support us in terms of infrastructure.” It’s just too unstable. It’s got to be a different way. It’s got to be more creative. Yeah.
IC: All right. Any last thoughts to add before I…
SM: I can’t think of any other questions.
IC: I’m sure I’ll think of lots on my flight home. [Laughs]
SM: Well, just shoot me an email if there’s anything you want to talk over.
IC: Thank you!