EditorThis is a near-verbatim transcript of an in-person interview I did with Michelle Black in Halifax, NS, on June 9, 2019, where we were both attending the Editors Canada annual conference. This interview is 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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IC: All right, thank you so much, Michelle, for taking the time to sit down with me. It’s so exciting to see you here and to be able to chat with you.
MB: Likewise.
IC: I’m just going to read the questions off my phone, if that’s OK.
MB: Absolutely. No worries!
IC: All right. So yeah, the reason I’m doing this study is that I really found that… I was inspired by Karen Schriver, who was doing this full-fledged plain language history in the United States. And I was trying to find something equivalent in Canada and really didn’t find anything. And so there’s just this kind of gap in documenting what actually happened during this period that I’m studying—1980 to about 1995. Pretty flexible on that window. But really wanted to know about the plain language movement in Canada and the differences in context between Canada and the United States and the UK, and other places. So, yeah, just wanted to get your perspective on it.
MB: Sure.
IC: So when did you become involved with the plain language movement, and what inspired you to join?
MB: This is a great story, because I’ve told it so many times. In 1994, I had graduated with a French and Spanish language degree and a minor in cinema studies. And I was very interested in how information communicates and how different languages communicate, and I was horrible at math and science. So when I finished my undergrad, I started doing interpreting in Spanish and thought that might be a good way to go. Translation was not going to be my thing. It was too much like math—too boring and dry and… methodical. That’s the word.
So anyway, I started realizing that there was… “Oh, I could teach literacy.” Because if I’m not from the culture of somebody I’m interpreting for, Spanish or French, which in Toronto is often African people, people from all over the world, I’m not going to be able to serve them. So then I started teaching literacy as a volunteer and didn’t really know what I was going to do at that point. And then the first week, I took a literacy workers’ training course with Metro Toronto Movement for Literacy. And it was, like, I think a three-month course, once a week. And their first week was all about language and who does it belong to. And one of the papers that they came out with was from… I think it’s called Vancouver Literacy Group, and it was an older paper.
So it fits with your timeline. It was called “Writing on Our Side.” And it was very left, but it spoke to me hugely about the idea that, wow, you know what, there are people out there who take English and who know English inside out and can translate it into another kind of English.
And I thought, wow, that’s something I can get with. So then when I had done that, I did my project on plain language, and I actually did some sample before-and-after documents using DOS-based word programs. And the only graphic you had then was an arrow…
IC: [Laughs]
MB: …a nice, you know, hollowed-out arrow that you could use. But I used a few of those elements. And so that was the project. But then I found out in 1995 that a group called East End Literacy in downtown Toronto, led by a woman named Sally McBeth, who, yeah, you’d better have talked to. [Laughs]
IC: [Nods and laughs]
MB: Good, I’m happy to hear that. I was hoping she’d be here. She was training 10 new consultants. And what they had gotten at that time, the NDP government was in charge, so we had something called Jobs Ontario, a grant from them, to try and make East End Literacy as a nonprofit sustainable with a business.
So she… I wrote to her effusively telling her all about how I’d done this project. I couldn’t believe there was something like this. Could I get in? She let me in. So I got training. I then ended up sitting on East End’s board. I was living in downtown Toronto. So I was on the board as well during a time where they were becoming an organization from a collective and starting to use more of a business-like model, because there was a lot more demand, as there still is, on measuring outcomes and being able to show and demonstrate that you’re contributing but also self-sustaining.
So I worked with Sally and Clear Language and Design for, let’s see, ’90…, I guess it was four years as a volunteer.
IC: Wow.
MB: You were paid according to… I was a grants officer at a funding agency at the time. And I was also starting to do my master’s in adult education, because I wanted to learn about how adults learn. Because I thought as a literacy person, as someone who wants to take language and make it understandable, how do people actually come at that, and what perspectives are brought to that. A big part of that was the IALS literacy results, which I think came out in ’94 or ’96, and I don’t even know if they renewed them. I’ve heard they were in the process of renewing them. But which said that, you know, the average person, I think half of people read at about a grade six level. So that was great. So then I had done some jobs, was doing my master’s and thought, “Wow, you know, I could make a go of this as well.”
So in 1999, I started Simply Read Writing Service and then just either had little contracts on the side, mostly health care, mostly drug packaging stuff that I had done with Sally and her group. But this time it was my job to go out and get the work, right?
But I was able to, through word of mouth, also did a lot of on-site contracts with people, where I would fill in for a communications position, do employee communications, whatever they needed, but I wanted it to be clear. And studying organizational development in my master’s, it was about also thinking that people in workplaces—it’s not just people with low literacy that are going to have issues; it’s anybody. And one of the jobs I had during the Simply Read period was at SickKids Hospital, and they had a health literacy focus for about a year and a half. And I was one of two people who were overhauling all of the patient education materials, which included not only taking what they always photocopied and said that the patients always loved, and coming back and saying, “Well, you know, we’re seeing these problems,” but also commissioning illustrations to make sure that they were appropriate and also really connected well with what the message was, weren’t offensive, etc.
So now I’m going into, like, later-on periods, so I’m not sure that is as relevant, but… It’s still relevant? OK.
IC: Yes, of course.
MB: Well, and there’s a trajectory, too, because I guess in… As soon as I got into plain language, I actually was one of the first people to have a job as a plain language writer. In 1998, after SickKids, I went to the Canadian Health Network, which was a government-run, government-funded health-promotion website. And back then, there wasn’t… there was no WebMD, there was nothing. And there weren’t people walking around with smartphones.
So when we thought about producing information for online, it had to be possible to print it and hand it out to somebody. So what we wrote was very bare bones, and my job was to oversee and develop 33 different sets of frequently asked questions about health topics and health-affected groups in Canada. So it went from, you know, men’s health, women’s health, Aboriginal people’s health, but then also, you know, had different foci on cancer or on active living, you name it. Very health-promotion focused, so it was all about making sure that not only can people understand this, but they’re going to get resources that actually relate, that they can go to, that are accessible.
And I’ve met some people in the US since then, because I started with the Plain Language Association International in 1998, went to Houston in 2000, their conference, and then co-organized the 2002 one with Sally McBeth. And by 2002, I felt that I had been doing a lot of health information, but I was also seeing a lot of things coming into the discussion, like usability, because it was just starting—web accessibility, so making sure that the code behind what appears on the screen is also understandable and that people have equal access to what’s there.
And then there were different disciplines, and through Plain Language Association, I learned that actually in the UK, specifically, Australia, too, New Zealand—they were way ahead of us. The legal community, the National Health Service. All of them were way ahead of us. And so in Canada and the United States, we were just starting to really understand what that looked like. And so we brought together in 2002… we had a technology kind of focus, we had a law focus, we had a health information focus, and then we had more of an editing focus.
And that was the first one that brought together people from all over the world. Sally had, and her colleagues at East End, had the brilliant idea to solicit funding so that we could afford to pay people from all over the world to come and speak, and we were able to secure that, and also be paid a little bit ourselves for doing the work. Because both of us… like, she had a full-time job, I didn’t—I kind of lost… the problem with health literacy and plain language contracts is even if you have a “job,” it’s a contract. And sometimes what you did goes in a drawer when somebody at the top of the organization gets a great idea. Or they think is a great idea. So we were able to bring together quite a few people and really launch the organization into something that was a lot more of a business.
So that was great. I guess the only other significant thing around that was that because I had been having all of my contracts get cancelled and because I was in mostly nonprofit community information, I wasn’t doing very well financially, or stability-wise, and I was planning a family at the time. So I ended up taking a full-time job at Aviva Insurance in 2003 and was a senior communications specialist. But basically my job was to be a corporate reporter for the corporate intranet, and there’s a parent company in the UK—this was the Canadian branch, which had about 3,000 employees across Canada. So while it was not talking to the wider community, it was talking to a community of employees about what’s going on in the larger picture and also doing a lot of employee recognition for projects that had succeeded trying to help people get to know one another better across the business. I got to interview everybody in the company. I got to work with the CEO all the way down to everybody in every level and learn about what they did. And I think my job I felt was to clearly make everybody shine and really help support a positive tone of voice.
That’s actually the biggest thing for me, is not only… there’s a lot of guidelines around what’s clear, how you use sentence structure, all of these things, but for me it’s also about tone of voice. It’s huge. I don’t feel it’s covered as much. It’s a hard thing to grapple with. I’m actually writing a book about it now. [Laughs]
So after 2003, the thing that I could say, and again this is more probably stuff that is already out there, but from 1994, when I got interested in plain language and it was a movement, and there were only 50 people in Texas for 1999, by 2002 we had 250 people in Toronto, and people from all different fields, and we were starting to actually crystallize this idea.
And the slogan for the conference, that one, was “Across disciplines and around the world.” Because I think we wanted to really acknowledge that being clear is going to have to embrace so many different areas of expertise, and that we need to be collaborative, and that we need to also always raise that awareness of what’s important about being clear, and why we’re doing it. And it’s not about—you’ve heard this—it’s not about always speaking like a child to another child, or a parent to a child. In fact, I can’t stand the finger-wagging tone of voice. Plain language can sometimes get into that if you’re not careful.
So 2003, we’ll go back to that, after the health thing, what I found, and this is where we’re talking about plain language coming into its own, I guess, as something more than a movement, by the time I hit Aviva in 2003, I ended up working in financial services after that, and in 2008 became a full-time freelancer, just working for banks, insurance companies, people with financial information that consumers all needed, had to make big decisions about but couldn’t necessarily access or understand. And by that time, I would say, by the time I ended up working later on for Sun Life, Manulife—I pitched for a huge plain language contract for them, and won it, I was very happy—and a few other big companies like that where they were being… and the Canadian Bankers Association, I gave some workshops on how to write disclosure notices, so those messages that say, “If you only make your minimum payment, it’s going to take you 143 years to pay off your credit card.” I worked with a bunch of communications professionals to not only raise awareness of what can make that information difficult, but also about ways that you can take on that kind of work and build champions within your organizations to do it. So by that time, like I’d say, you know, 2009, so many financial companies were finding themselves looking for plain language experts, because they were noticing that… and they were starting to listen to their customers more. And I think that was a big turning point, certainly.
And I mean, I think with health and social services, there’s a whole other kind of advocacy that goes on, but the one that I’m familiar with has more to do with that whole customer experience movement and the voice of the customer and customer friendliness and preventing-customer-irritation factor. So I’m really pleased and I feel blessed because I myself now don’t have a business for plain language, but I think that I was one of the people who paid attention and tried to bring it in and really, really spread the word about what that was. And what’s even better, I’m seeing now, I was with EAC back then, too—it was still called EAC, Editors Canada. And there were a few people in the group then that were saying, “Plain language is good editing.” And I agree. I agree.
And so what’s really been great is that since then, and even, like, when I put up my shingle full time in 2008, I suddenly found there were a whole bunch of other people out there who were probably spit out of government jobs or spit out of their corporate jobs and said, “You know what—I’ve already been doing this. I’m going to hang up a plain language sign and say that that’s the service I provide.” And while… It was threatening, but at the same time I also had pretty good contacts by then, but at the same time, every kind of information can benefit from being clear. And every person is going to have their own collection of people they’ve worked with, communities that they know, subject matter they know. Like, insurance—I can write about insurance. I’m writing about accounting now. It’s a learning curve. [Laughs]
But I think that, you know, back again when… in the period you’re talking about—and even now sometimes—those literacy results from IALS were the most compelling. There’s still a book out by a guy named Joe Kimble. Well, yeah, I’m sure you know him and have heard of him. He wrote Writing for Dollars, Writing to Please and then Lifting the Fog of Legalese. He’s been one of the biggest advocates. And in fact, when I was with Sun Life consulting, I got them to hire him to go talk to the lawyers, because they weren’t going to have me come talk to them at all. Right? I didn’t have a law degree. So that was cool.
And there’s been a whole health literacy movement that has that name now—which you’re part of, I imagine [laughs], possibly—that has become a thing. And people are allying themselves with that. So I guess, you know, the best thing to say is now, I see just how many different ways there’s a need for plain language. And I think that more of us who are editors and who have a very specific focus, even—and especially graphic designers, oh my gosh, someone like Karen Schriver, information design, it’s not just about the words. It’s about everything around the organization, the graphical elements you choose, how you align everything.
I was fortunate, and I don’t know how this was back in the day, but when Sally taught us in 1995, it was also about design. It wasn’t just about the language. And I think that back then, that was a thing that wasn’t as well understood, the connection between the two. At least not by any… You know, editors understood it, but I don’t know that people would necessarily say, not only am I going to look at your words—I’m going to look at how you lay this out. And back then, we were developing paper prototypes because there was no other way. You couldn’t send someone a PDF. Nobody had a phone that they could look at that. So you would have to do a paper prototype in Word and say, this is how it’s going to read, this is where the margins are, this is how there’s more white space, etc. This is the heading styles I’m using.
And then web accessibility, that really just started to get more known about in the early 2000s. And I took a web accessibility course online then.
But what I think is awesome now is that there are people who are young now coming into the field of communication who have had access to all of this stuff, but they don’t make assumptions about how clear or usable something is. Just because you have the tools doesn’t mean you should use all of them, right? Like I always used to put up a graphic, a slide, about clear design and about harmonizing design and say, just because you can use all these fonts and colours and styles doesn’t mean you should. And I’d have it in all these weird styles and they’d fly around the screen. Obviously there are things about the way websites were designed—to blink, for example—that was just such a bad thing, but we all wanted to do it because it was cool. Especially in green, highlighted. It’s like those pie charts that Robin Marwick talked about yesterday. It’s like people do these 3D pie charts and they think they make them more interesting. And I think that what’s interesting now is that everybody has access to tools that they think they can use to design things.
And again, just because we can, just because Excel will spit out a graph for us doesn’t mean it’s the right graph, doesn’t mean it has the right data, doesn’t mean necessarily it’s readable or understandable. And because more authors now have access to all of these ways to make their information more interesting, it just makes the task of editing and understanding… I think it has to be more collaborative. You can’t say… I mean a lot of times you edit something and the designer gets it and then you look at the proof and you go “Whoa,” right? But I think now all the way along, there needs to be more collaboration because so many people are going to touch that piece of work, and I think there has to be a commitment between… from the side of the writer, maybe not the writer, but the next person who gets it to help them understand, that all the way along that chain, there’s a commitment to not only how it’s going to look, but how people are going to use it, how people are going to have to… what response mechanism… and how many are you going to give them, and are they duplicating, are they easy to use. There’s a huge, much huger chain now of people compared to back then. Back then it would be, “OK, well, we’re going to make this a postcard, we’re going to give you a little space to put your address or whatever and a stamp. You know, this is print, here it is.” Or “This is online, you should be able to print it out and if you photocopy it in black and white, well, we can’t use too many colours.” It was so limited.
And so your idea of making access to information was only about words, very basic designs, very basic delivery mechanisms. Whereas it has evolved since then. I think that, you know, I know for myself, I do not at all market myself to be a web writer, a web design assessor, even a blog writer anymore because there are so many different ways that that information gets taken and manipulated and, unless I’m the person at the top of the food chain saying, “These are all of the areas we need to attend to and the people on that team need to connect about this or this or this accessibility or design or language issue,” I wouldn’t be able to claim to say that at the end of the project, you’re going to get something that your readers will understand.
And the last thing I could say about too is field testing, because I think it’s really important. I’ve always thought it was really important. Luckily, there are a lot of mechanisms now in place for that, especially for larger companies. I don’t know as much about how community organizations do it, but, you know, early on, like, not long after ’95, I think, like, one of my first contracts was to do a quit-smoking manual and it was written for… there were a couple of different ones. One was for pregnant women, and I was just rewriting, and the other one was for young men. Very different audiences. There were illustrations done. But part of the contract—it was from the Ontario Tobacco Strategy. And I think the health people were a lot further along than the financial people in understanding just how clear things need to be and why it’s important. Probably because the risk of not understanding health information is probably in some way seen as higher than not understanding financial—because people just assume you’re not going to understand financial information.
IC: [Laughs]
MB: But what was really cool was I did get, even way back then in a project—like 1998—to have funding put as part of the project, so I could actually go out to different community groups and test these materials and ask them questions and get their reactions to the pictures. But there have been a lot of projects I will say, and I don’t know if it’s like this now, but I suspect it was like this back when you’re studying, that you didn’t get to—you didn’t have that opportunity. I think that it was something that needed to really be advocated for, not… and sometimes it would be built into the plan but it wouldn’t really be done, and I think it was because nobody really understood what that meant. Fortunately now people like Jakob Nielsen when he came out with his web usability book, people like Karen Schriver as well, who think about the broader design of a document, were realizing that, you know what, user testing is not a huge deal. It doesn’t take a lot of people. Trends tend to present themselves really early.
But even at SickKids Hospital, like in the late ’90s, I was there and we were supposed to as part of our process be able to test those documents. Never got to. Never got to. It was just never considered. A lot of the people who get a plain language editor—I don’t know if they… actually, I hear that it’s still the case—“Can you just plain language this please?”
IC: [Laughs]
MB: “It’s done. It’s done. It’s been approved by our entire committee. All of the medical professionals have looked at it. The lawyers have looked at it. Can you just plain language it please?” They don’t want you. They don’t want you there. And what they think they’re going to get back from you is something just very tidy and… right?
You can often end up coming back and asking a lot of questions and really having them come back to basics and say, “What are you trying to do here? Why are you going to spend all this money? Why are you going to have all this information?” I think there’s, again, in larger corporate settings, testing is something that they have departments for. It’s great. Thank God.
But I would imagine if it’s a document versus a website or something where you can easily pop it to someone and say, “Can you take a look at this? I’m going to study how you use it.” I don’t know. I don’t know honestly still if that’s something that really gets done.
I’ve talked a lot.
IC: You have, and you’ve covered a lot of ground already! I’m looking at my questions to see if there’s anything left to say. I guess you seem pretty optimistic about where things are going. I’ve talked to some people who are quite optimistic because there’s training now.
MB: Credentials you can get.
IC: Yeah. And you don’t really need to explain to that many people what plain language is anymore, compared with even five years ago. Then there were people I talked to who were kind of pessimistic and saying that there is no movement anymore. There isn’t the same kind of political push and leadership at the government level to make things plain language as there was in the period that I’m studying—you know, the late ’80s or early ’90s. I’m wondering about your take on it and what you feel about where the movement is now and where it’s going.
MB: Hm. That’s a good question because, like I said, I think… I don’t feel it is still as much of a movement because I don’t feel that it needs to be a movement because I think there’s enough awareness of what that is. I mean, OK, you could say there’s probably the odd person out there who’s co-opting plain language and saying, “I can do plain language. I’ve got two kids. I can speak in that language.” But I suspect there aren’t that many like that. I have a feeling that most people who are doing that kind of work understand very well what it is and are getting work. And because I feel at least that there is such a direct tie with areas like customer experience with AODA, Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act. In Ontario—I don’t know if they’re all provinces like that. OK, so then maybe there’s that, too. But in Ontario, we’ve had legislation that is forcing people. Some people look at it as a bit of an afterthought, but at the same time, they still have to do it. They know it exists. And I guess perhaps the only way that maybe it could be felt that it’s needed and nobody’s paying attention to it is in the fact that, what I said earlier, there are so many ways now that people get information. And I know for myself, as much as I think that one of the reasons I was drawn to plain language besides the fact that languages came easily and I felt, “Wow, this doesn’t come easy to everybody. I should help them and then they can help me with my math.”
IC: [Laughs]
MB: But I think that with technology, there are so many actions now that we need to take in our daily lives that will cost us money or not just because of what we’ve got in our hand. And I think that there are probably a lot of ways that people can be deceived and people can be drawn down a path that maybe they don’t want online because they don’t read everything or they have that click kind of mentality now. You know, it’s like we’re going to click the terms and conditions. Nobody’s reading them. It’s a joke. So perhaps maybe that is where it’s becoming a problem.
For example, cell phone prices in Canada and the contracts associated with them. I know for myself right now, I have to call back my provider and find out why they billed me three times what I thought when I started my contract with them. And I’m not keen on doing that. And the reason I’m not keen is not because I’m not aggressive or assertive if I need to be. [Laughs] It’s because I need to be sitting in front of that computer with at least an hour of my time ready to be able to do all the things they’re going to tell me to do to check the things I’m supposed to already know about how to set my settings. I believe that with technology, particularly, a lot of us are feeling that way. We’re kind of slaves to the click, slave to the Wi-Fi, whatever, and slave to the bill if we just don’t, like me, don’t have the motivation to figure it out.
And when it comes to privacy as well, the availability of information now—we were in the copyright session this morning, the idea that people say, “Oh, well, it’s on the internet, so I can use it.” I think that a lot of us are very blasé about what is widely available information. So it could be that the people who are saying there should be more political will are looking at those kinds of things. The kind of stuff that goes on behind the scenes where just as plain language wanted to demystify health information, government information for social service recipients, legal information for somebody having to go to court or subject to a legal process, I suspect that now, it’s “What’s going on here with all of this information swimming? What is going on with the way we’re all using, sharing, making sense of, transmitting, paying for, hacking into?” [Laughs]
I think that a need for clarity in information might have some impact on how that all goes. Because again, you get your cell phone contract, you don’t read it, then you end up having to pay it. It’s in your contract. These are all the things that we’re now subject to in this technological space. So perhaps that would be the next groundswell in terms of, this is information that most of us can’t access. We don’t know what’s behind this. All we know is how we want it to work and what we want to accomplish. And when it doesn’t work, it causes stress. And when we’re stressed, we make bad decisions. When we make the bad decisions, we pay for them. [Laughs]
IC: So it really all comes back to the ethical issue of giving people the literacy and the information they need to make good choices.
MB: I think so. Again… You’re right. You’re getting to basic concepts. And I guess for me, the technology piece and the information-sharing piece is what is the new area that they have to tackle in terms of, again, how can you make a good decision when everything is so mystified? And at the same time, things are moving so quickly. And information is in front of you one second—the next, it’s gone. It’s so easy to lose track of your life, of your money, of your identity. All the education about how to protect yourself, protect your identity, and all the services that people give you to do that, but then there’s the fine print about what they do. And at the same time, there is a technical writing profession. And there’s IEEE and people like that.
Thank God for them. But they can’t control the way the system spits out and shares information. The way the system, the way whoever is setting that up… Those people may not realize who they’re leaving out. Because people make assumptions. If it’s fast and easy to do, they’ll do it. Yeah, we’ll do it, but what are the consequences of doing this? That’s what I think now.
IC: Yeah, very important insights. Thank you. I think we’re getting close to the end of our time. Is there anything you wanted to add?
MB: You’re a great interviewer. [Laughs]
IC: Oh! I don’t think I did anything. It all came from you!
MB: Is there anything else I want to add? Hmm.
IC: Because you did talk about… my questions related to how the movement in Canada compared with other places. You addressed that already. You addressed some of the more culturally, politically important events like the literacy survey that came out that really kind of motivated a lot of this work. You talked about your roles and activities. Yeah, are there any accomplishments related to the movement that you’re especially proud of?
MB: The fact that I still consider myself part of it and the fact that I still have to explain to people what it is. That’s maybe… Well, that’s not really an accomplishment, but I’m proud of still being able to associate with it. And I guess what I’m happy about for myself is that I haven’t always been able to be full throttle in the field in the respect of having jobs that, yeah, it’s important to be clear. I think what I’m proud of is that I’ve realized just how many different places it’s important to be clear in. And that is something I will never stop doing. I’ll never stop feeling like people have the right to information that they can understand so that they can make better decisions. And I will always be supporting people who do that well for other people, to help them do that.
IC: Wonderful. Would you like to end there?
MB: Sure.
IC: Or did you have anything else to say?
MB: Well, the only thing I could say: self-plug—I’m doing a book about… having, um… It’s called Communicating with Character. And it’s about using character traits in how you communicate with people to elicit a more positive response.
IC: Wonderful.
MB: Yeah, so I’m trying to tackle the tone of voice piece. And thinking that, you know, the areas of customer service, all these messages we get all over the place, the ways we get them. I think there’s a lot more to be said about that because we get a lot of automated stuff now. So, thank you.
IC: Thank you Michelle!
MB: Thank you. I’m so glad we finally were able to make this work. Oh my gosh.