EditorThis is a near-verbatim transcript of an in-person interview I did with Jan Catano and Gwen Davies, on June 10, 2019, at a breakfast diner in Halifax, NS. 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 their views at the time, those views might have evolved since the interview took place.
The audio includes a fourth voice near the start of the interview that, based on context, might belong to designer Detta Penna, but neither Jan nor Gwen could definitively say it was her.
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GD: I brought a few little…
JC: Oh, you brought useful things. I just brought pretty things.
GD: Well, my pretty things are all online. And here’s one I wrote.
JC: Yes, I remember that. I have it on my Kindle.
GD: Yeah. And it’s so beautifully designed.
JC: Kathy [Kaulbach] did it?
GD: Kathy did it.
So I think one of the really important things is that you need a designer who understands plain language. Otherwise, you don’t end up… I did a wonderful little booklet for people on social assistance or looking at social assistance. And they wouldn’t let me name the designer or have a say in the design. To their credit, I locked them in a room for four hours with me, and I said, “Nobody’s leaving till we’re done.” Because I had things to hit them up with, and I could see how—you know, these are social workers. They’re out of their minds 100% of the time. And they agreed to it, and we did it. And then I looked at the front cover of the book, and it was all these nice middle-class people. And I thought, “What are you thinking? Nobody will see themselves. They will just see another middle-class effort to guide and control them.”
JC: To fix them.
GD: To fix them, yeah.
JC: Remember we wrote that article on plain language design for a graphic—what was it called? The Ascender? It was like this newsletter for graphic designers, and you and I wrote an article on design for plain language and why that was as important as the actual words. Because nobody would get to the words if the design didn’t draw them in. That was ages ago.
GD: Ages ago, yeah. A long, long time ago.
[DP?]: I could insert here that I’m a book designer. And I have worked in elementary and high school as well as college and trade. But one of my earliest jobs was doing a health series for Harcourt. And we thought about stuff like that, but we had one designer on staff who used a typeface in which the combination of R and N were too close and always read as M. And they let it go, but it was a workbook. But it is really important. [About food] What flavour would you like?
JC: Detta actually designed a book on book design [Print That Works by Elizabeth W. Alder]. Remember that one—the big one that I bought? I didn’t know you had designed it.
[DP?]: Really?
JC: Your name is in it.
[DP?]: Really?!
JC: Because you said… I saw it in your office and said, “I have that,” and you said, “I designed it.”
[Crosstalk]
[DP?]: OK.
IC: [To a server at the restaurant] Thank you.
GD: Wave it in a few people’s faces and get it on Amazon.
[DP?]: So I double agree with what you guys are saying. And in yours, especially, to be able to say, read the boldface—and to be able to read the boldface as different from the plainface, instead of being…
GD: Yes. The boldface tells the entire story for somebody in a big hurry. And then the stuff in between is for when you go, “Oh, I wonder what that means.” I’m sure you’ve been told this stuff before, but we’ll pretend you haven’t. We’re just going to go right at it, right?
[DP?]: But your boldface was materially different from the text face.
JC: Yes.
[DP?]: And sometimes the boldface is not that different.
JC: Yeah, it doesn’t really stand out. But Derek was instinctively good at that. My designer is Derek Sarty, and he’s instinctively good at that. And that helps. It’s funny, I gave workshops for years. Have you talked to Mary Breen? She’s in Ontario somewhere. She used to live in Peterborough, and I don’t know if she still does. But she and I did workshops on plain language. She wrote a book on health for women in shelters.
GD: That was kind of a taking of the women’s collective—the Boston Women’s Health Collective.
JC: Yeah, and I used to use that in my workshops. She and I would give workshops, and we would have her little paragraph on condoms and then the Boston Women’s Health Collective’s lengthy thing on condoms and explain who each was for and how you had to determine what your audience needs. And that’s the big revelation to everyone. It’s all about who’s reading it, not who’s writing it.
GD: Write it for yourself and then rewrite it for the audience so that you know what you want to say and get it down and then write it for the audience so that… put yourself… I had a 17-year-old girl that I always put her in my mind.
JC: [To the server] Thank you.
Server: Two poached eggs. [Unintelligible] I can’t mess that up. There you go. Enjoy.
JC: Thank you.
GD: Thank you.
JC: I always get extra sausage if you don’t get toast.
GD: Here’s a nice… I don’t know if you’ve seen that one.
IC: I might not have actually. So, Reading the Legal World: Literacy and Justice in Canada.
GD: Yeah, it was a good task force many years ago. Don’t know that they’re still available, but I bet you you could get one.
Server: And if you want jam for your toast, it’s down here.
GD: What is it?
Server: We tried to make a little more room. So if you wanted any of this, I will be your server.
GD: So nice to have two servers. [Laughs]
Server: Is there anything else at all that you need?
JC: For the moment, I think we’re good.
GD: I’d like a couple more milk, if you don’t mind.
JC: So you should start asking questions in an orderly fashion. Otherwise, we’ll just riff off each other for hours and you’ll get nowhere.
GD: Well, you’ll get somewhere, but it may not be where you want to go.
JC: …be where you want to go.
IC: Oh, it’s bilingual.
GD: Yes, it’s a great little book. It was a good task force. I had just left Canadian Law Information Centre, which became the Canadian Legal Information Centre. And [to server] thank you. And was still really on fire and working here, you know. So it was really fun to do that.
IC: All right, so, yeah, when did you get involved in plain language, and what inspired you to get involved?
JC: Mine was my thesis, my master’s thesis. I was a founder of the Prepared Childbirth Association of Nova Scotia. And we had a dire need for respectability. So I volunteered to be the one to go to school and get letters behind my name so we would get taken more seriously. And went off for health education, which—considering my background was in medieval literature—was, like… they took me in—that’s all I can… I’ll give them credit.
Anyway, once I was accepted into school, I was eligible for summer student grants. So the Prepared Childbirth Association and I wrote a proposal, and I got a student summer grant to write what became a handbook for pregnant teenagers. And when I went to graduate school, I wanted to use that somehow in my thesis. And Ed Belzer, who was my faculty advisor, he taught me four of the seven courses I had to take, and he was my thesis advisor. Like, I had a degree in Ed, not a degree in health ed. He was a lovely man.
Anyway, he said, sure, you know, but you can’t just do it on yours, you gotta do some compare and contrast or something. So I started looking at all of the material for pregnant girls that was available, which was pathetically little. And that was when I discovered the means of comparison would be readability formula. And that was when I discovered how really weird they were and how to do multiple regressions and all kinds of fun stuff. But that really led me to examine why a book was readable and why it wasn’t.
And we had… The teenage pregnancy book, was… A friend of mine, recently deceased, and relatively famous romance writer in her old age, Jo Beverly, she did the illustrations for the book. And so we had cartoons, and we did comic strips, and we did all kinds of things just because they made it interesting for us. But we had no idea what would make it interesting for teenagers—just that we’d been teenagers fairly recently. I mean, we were both in our late 20s, early 30s. And it turned out to be… We got plagiarized a lot, let me put it that way. Public health units across the land just ripped us off. But that was OK, because that was the point.
GD: That’s why you wanted.
JC: Yeah. But that was when I got interested in, “Well, if we can do this…” I looked at… One of the things that I used was cloze procedure. Have you seen it? Yeah. And that gets you into the brain. And it was fascinating, fascinating what you discover when you use that. My biggest one was that I was using Caesarean birth because I thought Caesarean section would be too obscure. Well, anyway, that was one of the words that turned out to be missing in the randomized removal that was part of the cloze procedure.
No. Those girls knew everything about childbirth gone wrong, because particularly at the time, there was a home for pregnant girls, and I went there—many other places, but there as well. And they watched soap operas all day. And there has never in the history of the world been a normal birth on a soap opera.
IC and GD: [Laugh]
JC: I mean, they just don’t happen. You’ll have a baby come out of someone’s ear before you’ll have an uncomplicated vaginal birth. They knew all about IVs, they knew all about Caesarean sections. They didn’t say “stitches,” they said “sutures.” They were… But they had no idea about labour or the processes that were involved. And that was anything abstract. Like, no matter how small the syllable count, they just didn’t get it. But it didn’t matter in a sense how many syllables were in it—if it was something concrete, they were good. And I found those kinds of insights fascinating and extracted from it a bunch of general principles that Mary and I later used in our workshop.
But that was it for me in the sense that I had no idea that this whole field even existed until then. And it turned out to be great fun. And you know, God, I’m 71 now. It was 40-some years ago, so…
GD: It was early days. It was just beginning to… I moved out to Ontario to get an income, basically, for a while and got involved in literacy—another obviously lead-in. And I worked in Ottawa at the Literacy Program with Ruth Baldwin, who is another big name. And she was just exploring…
JC: [To server] Thank you.
GD: She was just exploring plain language then. Introduced me to some people. So I moved to Toronto and what a feisty bunch of community literacy workers. It was just unbelievable. It was like an explosion. And plain language was the thing they were discovering themselves. And the first thing was AIDS and people on the street. And what use was it to put out a brochure that people had no idea what the heck it said? So we were using words. And it was shocking. It was really shocking. And I got involved in a literacy organization in the west end of Toronto, Alpha, and was hired to do a plain language newspaper.
Now, of course, I had no idea what I was doing. So the first draft I put together, this wonderful woman in the program. June Douglas, came to me and she said, “I don’t think so.” [Laughs] I said, “OK, June, you tell me what to do.” And she just worked with me a bit. She was great. And said, “You know, these are the kind of senses that people use, and this is the kind of thing people will read.” And then this job came out at the Canadian… it was still Canadian Law Information Centre, I think. I don’t remember. I don’t remember just when it changed. But I applied for it, never imagining in my wildest imagination getting it. It was like a two-shoulder-pad, you know, on each side kind of job. And I got it.
And it was amazing. They had a library, [David] Melinkoff, and… who were the people… Anyway, Robbie Eagleson had already come. I’m sure you’ve heard of that visit, and they had done—I got this out because health went big. And Jan, as you will see, photocopied this for me from… But they did great stuff, and it was all about testing, which is what we discovered in literacy. It’s all about testing. People still will hire me all the time. Well, used to. I don’t do it anymore. Nobody hires me, but… They wouldn’t, won’t test. They just… I think the last thing I got to test was the off-highway vehicles handbook, which was enormous fun. We worked with Kathy Kaulbach again. She is, like, instrumental in doing things here in plain language. And you’ll see her handiwork in everything that has my name on it, just about.
So I brought you the plain language lease, which… Before I got hired, I was the first person hired at the Canadian Legal Information Centre to do plain language. And they had done this… I saw the original lease. That’s for, you know, assisted housing kind of thing. It was 11 pages of legal. It had quarter-inch margins all the way around. It was in about eight-[point] type. And people were to sign this and go by it. And it took them… I think it took them a year and a half or something like that. And they came out with that. And that was a definitive thing in Canada, that lease. And it just basically says the five things you need to know.
And on the other side is Clendunning v. Tilden Rent-A-Car, which every legal plain language person holds dear in their heart. Clendunning rented a car, and he didn’t read all the stuff in the thing. And nor could he. Went out, got smacking drunk, wrapped the thing around a pole, and won the court battle because he said nobody could be expected to either read that or understand it. Tilden had the first plain language car rental agreement in history. And it was very good. So that’s how I got involved.
And I stayed till just before the… it wasn’t long after I left that CLIC closed. And that wasn’t because it wasn’t doing the best thing in the world. It’s because it was… the Canadian Bar Association was suffering under bad management, shall we say.
JC: But there were a lot of things that got started during that UN Decade of Literacy, which was the ’80s, wasn’t it? And a lot of things got started. And then they just went away. You know? One of the things I’ve found over the years to be extremely helpful is, I have worked for the same people for a long time. Like, I worked for the feds—that was who did Nobody’s Perfect. And I’ve worked for the province. And they’re the only people who actually develop plain language materials because publishers aren’t interested because they’re aimed at people who don’t buy books. So, you know, like… and… But Nova Scotia’s a place—for a long time—was a place that did not have massive turnover in their civil service jobs. ’Cause there are not a lot of jobs here, so if you get one, you keep it. And so I worked with the same people over a period of decades. And by the end, when we did my most recent gigantic project, which was another parenting series called Loving Care, I had them trained to pre-test. Like, the sex book had been such a big success, and I said, we tested it, we tested the drafts, we talked to the kids. That’s why they all like it so much.
Also, it’s about sex, but I didn’t think that that would help. And so when we did Loving Care, they were fine. We tested with target audiences all over the province. We tested drafts, we found different ways to do testing.
But the problem is, with governments, is that you can show through a test that something… like, one of the big revelations was that we did one of our focus tests was with street-involved youth who had children. OK, so these were through Phoenix House. And they were girls, and a couple of dads were there. And it was the only focus group, and we had done a lot. We did them with the girls over in the support for a single young mother’s—SHYM, Supportive Housing for Young Mothers. We’d give them a chap–… We wouldn’t give them the whole typewritten book because they weren’t laid out. We’d give them a chapter, and then we’d go over and talk about it.
This lot couldn’t read the chapter, so we had it read aloud to them. The one girl who could read, she read it aloud to them before we went in for the thing. But throughout the focus test, not one of them, unless you were speaking directly to them, raised their eyes from their phone. They could read on a screen. They just didn’t want to read paper. And what we learned from that focus group was we need an app. If we want to reach these people, we need an app. But the province said, “Yeah, yeah, you need an app. Big whoop—we’re not going to spend the money on one.” So as far as I know, it’s PDF’d, but they’re not going to… That’s, like, way too much trouble. They need an app where you can go and say, “colic,” and it will take you to the page that talks about colic.
And so I got them to believe in testing this little unit. And then the government didn’t follow through. And then shortly after Loving Care was finished, the government changed its policy so that Communications Nova Scotia now handles all the publications for all the departments. Like they can’t do their individual process. And Communications Nova Scotia’s process is nowhere near as warm and fuzzy as the health departments became. And plus they instituted this policy just as the plain language specialist retired. And they replaced Diane.
GD: Is Diane retired?
JC: Yeah.
IC: She’s still working, I believe. I talked to her yesterday.
GD: [About an item on the table] You can have that if you want.
IC: Oh, thank you.
JC: I had heard she… someone told me she retired, and she’s got a grandbabies coming out the yin-yang.
IC: [About the item] Oh, that’s great.
GD: [About the meal] Is there a raspberry in there?
JC: No, there’s strawberry, orange marmalade and grape.
IC: And apple jelly.
JC: And apple jelly.
GD: Excuse me. I have a very bad habit of eating bacon, jam on toast. So there you go. That’s how we started. Yeah.
IC: [Laughs] And Jan, you mentioned that you weren’t really immersed in the movement itself, but I’ll ask this question anyway. How would you compare the movement in Canada to the movement in other parts of the world?
JC: I think Canada was, as a country, a bit later, because it seemed like we were always hearing from or hearing about people from elsewhere, like from England or… I only ever went to the one conference, and that was the big one in Winnipeg. I can’t remember the year, but it was a big plain language conference. I think I gave a talk at that one. Honestly, I can’t remember.
But I was a notetaker—took notes and then wrote a little article about that thing for the newsletter. And that had a lot of people from the west, where plain language got adapted earlier. Like when Diane…
GD: In Alberta.
JC: What’s Diane’s last name?
GD: Macgregor.
JC: Macgregor—thank you. Her husband got… came to grad school at Dalhousie, and she and her four kids and him came along. And she had worked in the plain language unit of the Saskatchewan government.
GD: Alberta.
JC: Alberta? And so she came here.
GD: Alberta went way early, yeah.
JC: Yeah. And they didn’t have anything comparable, but they hired her in Communications Nova Scotia.
And so anyway, at this conference, there was a heavy representation from the West. I think I was the only person from the Maritimes who went, but there were people from South Africa. There were people from other countries, people from the US. And they were trying at that conference to get some kind of organization to coalesce. And there… but there was a huge debate about who should be in it. Whether it should be a professional organization that would, you know, support this as a profession that would then be able to spread plain language through governments and, you know, make sure the documents that people read, or whether it should be more community driven. So they should be the ultimate recipients who were the, you know… And at the time, I was looking for a professional home, right? Like, there was no obvious place. I mean, I knew Gwen, and at the time it was me and Gwen—that was pretty much it. And I wanted… Gwen’s a member of the Writers Association because she writes fiction, too. I don’t.
The only nonfiction association at the time was the Periodical Writers Association of Canada. So I joined PWAC. Not my professional home. Lovely people, but they were all into electronic rights. This was in the early ’90s, and people were writing a column and getting paid a hundred bucks for it and then the newspaper was reprinting it and putting it online and doing all kinds of things, and they were trying to find a way to get paid for use. So that was totally not what I did. I wasn’t interested. But we had a lovely time hosting their annual conference one year in Halifax. That was fun.
But nothing happened, to my knowledge after that conference, because the split was… it was, you know… just some people wanted a professional home but not enough to found their own organization. Some people wanted the community to do it, but not enough of them.
And how do you do that internationally? Right? So, anyway, I don’t think there ever was a coalesced movement. Like, certainly not in the Maritimes. And now we have a group—a plain language group—Gwen and I are the grey eminences of the group.
GD: [Laughs] It’s very small.
JC: It’s very small. But they, you know, like, they hustle a lot harder for work than I ever hustled for work.
GD: I never hustled a day in my life.
IC: [Laughs]
JC: Like, yeah, you know, either they gave you the job or they didn’t. But… [to the server] can I have another shot of hot water, maybe?
GD: Here, have some of my tea. I’m not going to drink any more than that.
JC: I still have some—I just like to get the hot water before the tea bag’s completely depleted. But it’s going to happen anyway.
As far as, you know, like, I’ve given workshops all over the Maritimes. In New Brunswick, in Newfoundland, in PEI, in Halifax. I’ve given workshops in Ontario with Mary. I’ve given workshops in, you know, like, Portland. That’s because I knew someone in Portland. So that probably doesn’t count. But you know, we’ve given workshops with interest, you know, and I’ve given workshops for nutritionists, for advertising writers, for health educators, for literacy people. And they’re all really interested.
And, you know, and I try and give them, you know, like really simple, you know, “Think about these things,” you know, papers. And it never seemed to get beyond the actual person. Right? Like now this person could write better pamphlets. But her department didn’t suddenly see her as a resource. I even filmed one for the Department of Health. They videotaped me giving a workshop for which, for the first time in my life, I had makeup.
IC: [Laughs]
JC: And you know, and they used… they passed that around the province for years. And that was in the mid-’80s because I have the most ’80s-looking outfit on you could ever imagine. But it didn’t change the culture. It changed an individual.
You could… in the workshops you can see—because Gwen has, as of late, given way more workshops than I’ve given. It’s been a few years for me. And every once in a while you see the light go on over someone’s head. The light bulb is like, “Oh shit!” You know, and I would have them bring a pamphlet that their department had produced, you know, to work on in the afternoon. And the morning was all information. The afternoon was all hands on. Some of them, they would rewrite it and it would be worse. It would be worse.
GD: They just didn’t…
JC: They just couldn’t get their head around the idea. And some of them, it was like, “Oh my God, I see! I see!”
GD: [Laughs]
JC: And that was always fun. But I’ve never, you know, I haven’t done any kind of formalized follow-up, but nothing much has changed in the quality or nature of health publications beyond the individual who happened to be there. And, you know, like, I don’t know, because I retired just about when the shift to Communications Nova Scotia happened. And so I don’t know.
But before, like in health, everybody knew my name so that when, you know, they would have their staff meetings to talk about what they were working on, I would get… Someone would show them a brochure they were working on, on mosquito-borne illnesses or some obscure… And someone would say, you should get Jan to look at that, because it’s bad. And then those kinds of things would come through. So I did lice, bats, Lyme disease, mosquito-borne illnesses—like, weird stuff.
And, but only because the people in the health department knew me. So it was no extended culture that said to the environment people who were doing these terrible pamphlets, “We should try and make it so people can read them,” right? Like, there was no, you know… like, it wasn’t like we dropped a pebble and there was all these circles going out. It just went plop.
IC: [Laughs]
GD: Yeah, they just went straight down to the bottom. That was it.
JC: That was it.
GD: The guiding lights when I started at CLIC—what was brilliant in Canada at the time and persists to this day, fortunately, is the public legal education. And CLIC was sort of supporting and sustaining those. So that was really good. The Michigan State Bar was brilliant in the US, and they’re really the ones who—and Cooley Law School—and those were the two places that were really pushing it in the US. And it was Cooley that got the 2010 plain language, whatever, law or something passed. And that, you know, that made some difference. I don’t know that it’s made a huge difference, but it certainly made some difference.
And Australia, as you know, Eagleson, but there was a Communications Research Institute of Australia. Unfortunately, they were very snotty, and they felt that plain language was too crude a concept.
JC: Too plain. [Laughs]
GD: But they redid… they did a lot of work in business. They had a wonderful guy, Bennett—I can’t think of his first name—who was working with business organizations around the world. And he and I got together and did a lot of talking, and he took back some really nice stuff from that. And he showed me some good stuff that they’d been doing.
But CRIA went after… how many million dollars can you save if you do an insurance… if you sell insurance and people know what they’re getting? They won’t fill out forms wrong. So they were the forms people. They became the international forms people, Communications Research Institute of Australia. They were really outstanding. They knew how big your typeface had to be and what…
JC: Should you have lines or boxes? Should you have the little things that go up so people put their letters between them or don’t? They did a lot of that in Washington, too, after Australia started it. There was a lot—I have a bunch of research from Washington, where they… And that was… The money is what did it, right? Because if you have to hire somebody to call people up and sort out their damn forms, that costs you money. But if they can fill out the form right the first time, you’re good to go.
GD: And CRIA did a demonstration income tax form, and they did a huge study on it in Australia, and they put no questions on the fill-out part. It was only blank spaces and numbers, and you had to go to the guidebook. And it was 98%. 98%? Can you imagine that?
And they were getting returns like $400 million in over five years in an insurance and annuity company because the forms—people were filling them out right. Anyway, and of course, Chrissie and Martin were… I mean, I named my two cats Chrissie and Martin, what can I tell you? They were such a grassroots inspiration. They were in charge of the grassroots and they were my big inspiration. And I gave Sally McBeth her first plain language workshop.
IC: Oh!
GD: [Laughs] And that was fun. Twenty-six people showed up to sit around the circle, and I’m went, “I don’t think… 26 people? I can deal with 12!” [Laughs]
Anyway, we did it. They were all literacy people. I think Jenny Horseman even showed up. It was just terrifying. I was working at CLIC at the time, and I thought, I’ve got to make this grassroots. And the public legal education people were very good about that grassroots thing. So I was really a good hire in that position, as it turned out, coming out of literacy. So that was my worldview in those days.
And we… CLIC collected a wonderful library, an amazing library. Most books were US. But the other one was Michèle Asprey who was going around, and she’s in [Joe Kimble’s] book. But her law firm… Well she… yeah, her law firm went for it. And she went around the whole of Australia redoing that standard stuff, where you pull out the paragraphs and just insert them into contracts and all kinds of other legal writing.
JC: Boilerplate.
GD: Boilerplate stuff, and she redid it across Australia. So that was the other inspiration. And when she came to CLIC and we had a get-together and it was quite inspiring. So yeah, that’s my worldview.
JC: There was periods when there was a lot of stuff going on. And then there were periods where, you know, and you would see it in, like, well, I work with government all the time. And you would see it in—you know, there would be a lot of enthusiasm around it and then it would just die away. Because there was no real support.
GD: 1990 I did the bar admission course. Some of them were arms wide open, and some of them were, “Sweetheart, I just got the keys to the kingdom. You’re not taking them back.”
IC: [Laughs]
JC: Yeah, “And if I had to go through that shit”—it’s like residency in a hospital. Nobody… “But I survived it. Dammit, you’re going to survive it.” Right? Like, it’s a rite of passage almost, it gets to be. Yeah.
We did—remember when we did the forms for the education department around their financial, you know, who could get money? Remember we worked down in that horrible building across the street from the back end of Scotia Square? And the only good thing that came out of that was the blueberry. Elizabeth, what was her last name? Elizabeth drew the little blueberry with the Doc Martens?
GD: Yeah, that was the student loans form.
JC: Student loans forms, yeah.
GD: And they’re not good anymore. I’ve seen them and they’re terrible.
IC: [Laughs]
JC: But it was fighting tooth and nail. I mean, that was the single… it was one of the few projects I ever did that wasn’t health. And Gwen and I did it and her son, Traverse, helped us with the computer bits.
GD: He did a form. He put it together—a form based on all of CRIA’s form principles. But we just—the woman who hired me, and then I said I need to work with somebody on this; this is more than I can handle. And I called Jan in, and boy, she left. And the woman we got was not her. [Laughs] And that often happens.
JC: And there was no real sympathy in the department.
GD: Oh, it wasn’t sympathy—it was… I can’t say it on the tape, but, you know, a short four-letter word “and die.” “We don’t want you, we don’t need you, we don’t like you.”
JC: “This is stupid. You’re wasting our time here.” So we did it, and I think…
GD: We did some testing.
JC: Yeah. And I think they used the booklet, but I don’t think they ever used the actual forms, did they? Although I honestly, I was so glad to be done with that. I never really followed up.
GD: And we got paid… Very often I got paid half to two-thirds of a project and did the rest as volunteer.
IC: Wow.
JC: Yeah, ’cause that was also one of the very few projects I ever worked on that involved late nights. I mean, we spent…
GD: We stayed up all night, and I went down to…
JC: And, you know, Traverse was a teenager, my kids were teenagers. We weren’t young enough to pull overnighters without consequence any longer. [Laughs]
GD: That’s right, it wasn’t good.
Yes, I did a couple of things for the department. I worked for the Department of Education here for a while, and they had a literacy section, and they hired me to do plain language. So I put together two different kits. This is one from each. So a two-hour and a seven-hour, but people couldn’t do it, because plain language takes a while. You either have that inspiration and you blow into it, or you don’t get it. And unless you get it—even if you like the idea, you can’t do it.
JC: I’ve always thought of it as being like statistics, like stats. I studied, studied, studied and ten minutes after I passed my thesis, after my thesis, I could not have told you about it.
IC: [Laughs]
JC: My husband and elder son instinctively understand—like, they get stats. And it’s the same with this. Like, over the years of workshops, I’ve found, either you get it or you don’t get it.
GD: [To server] Can I have some more hot water, please?
Server: Yeah—just one moment…
JC: And it may be that we’ve just been unfortunate in that the people who don’t get it tend to be the ones who are the best bureaucrats.
IC: [Laughs]
JC: They rise through the system.
But yeah, I would… I mean, Gwen’s probably a better person to say, but as far as I could tell, there hasn’t been a real movement in the Maritimes. I don’t really know, having only spent a brief time in Ontario.
GD: BC was pretty good. Anyway, we were talking international, but Phil Knight, who worked in plain language, and you know him too, but he went to South Africa and did the constitution. I mean, how good is that? That was mind boggling. Yeah, so that was the other international thing that I meant to bring up. That’s all I know about international. But Chrissie Maher and Martin Cutts eventually had a big fight. So there’s a divided grassroots in England. [Laughs]
But nevertheless, I think it persists. I think there’s… especially around council housing. They started with council housing and medication, which may not be obvious from Joe Kimble’s book. But that’s where they got involved with trying to make those two things accessible.
And I remember walking… I lived around Sunnyside in Toronto. I was walking along that beach and thinking about one of their examples of a man dying with his heart medication in his hand because he couldn’t open the bottle. So that got them arrested… was the medication and council housing. Anyway, yes.
IC: Should we move on to the next question?
JC: Sure.
IC: What would you say were some of the more important political, social, or cultural events that influenced the early days of plain language in Canada or in the Maritimes?
JC: Oh, the UN Decade of Literacy is the one that springs immediately to mind, because when that happened, Ottawa paid attention, and they produced a booklet. We were cited in that little booklet, I think, in a footnote or something.
GD: Oh, good. I’m glad to hear it. [Laughs]
JC: And they produced, you know, it was a plain language for federal bureaucrats. There’s a little booklet on how to do this. You must have seen it. And that was, like, an initiative, but once the decade was over, it was, like, “OK, we did that, fine.”
IC: [Laughs]
JC: It’s like, UN Decade of the Refugee, right? It’s over, fine, no more refugees.
IC: [Laughs]
JC: No more plain language. But I can’t think of anything else off hand.
GD: Well, the beginning of the public legal education movement, I think, was huge, because it goes on to this day, and I don’t know how many dozen people I have said, “Call this number.” You can get 20 minutes of free consultation with a top-notch lawyer that you couldn’t afford on any subject. And you still can do that. And that is enormous. And people don’t know about it much.
But things like websites—I did a lot of websites in the last few years before I retired. I did the Engineers in Nova Scotia. And a reason for that was there was enough initiative from plain language…
Server: Can I get you anything else at all? Separate bills good for you all?
JC: Yeah, it’s fine by me.
IC: I should cover your breakfast!
GD: Well, only if we have a budget for it. If you don’t have the budget for it, we can buy our breakfasts.
JC: Seriously. We were students once.
IC: [Laughs]
GD: So if you don’t have a budget for it, we’ll just buy our own.
IC: That’s very gracious. I feel that honestly, if this place took credit card, I would absolutely…
JC: [Laughs] No, they don’t. They don’t.
GD: Good thing I went to the bank yesterday, or you’d be looking after my breakfast too. [Laughs]
JC: I did. Well, I went to the supermarket and got money. It’s all in tens because the poor girl, I was her second customer, and she didn’t have any money. [Laughs]
GD: Legal, I think, caught on maybe better than anybody else. So the study was useful. Public legal education has been enormously useful and continues to be. I worked with them on the divorce booklet, and we tested our brains out on that. And you could go in and negotiate an uncontested divorce. It was really brilliant. And those materials exist, and when they need updating, at least in public legal education, they continue to do that. Which is so lovely. And these are all legal. And, you know, this, I mean, when we get to the feather in my cap, that’s it. I actually have an international reputation for this.
JC: By God, you suffered enough while you were doing it. You should.
GD: The first one I did. But the reason it’s brilliant isn’t because I’m the most brilliant person. It’s because Kathy and I worked together every step of the way. This was made for somebody… some little cop with a brand-new app that they have to follow. No idea what it says. And they got a kid over the hood of the car. That was how it was explained to us. And what do I do now? And it’s all right there. That’s what you do now. You flip to the right page, and it’s right there. And it’s only the new stuff. And it was Mona Lynch that was the… she hadn’t become a judge yet, but she worked on this.
Anyway, and then this one was the Cadillac. This was the best one I ever did. But anyway, we aren’t at that question. You’re asking what were the big things in Canada.
So that was big. And I think getting street materials changed. So out of the literacy organizations, I think street materials changed across the country. I don’t think there’s any social worker in Canada that hands out incomprehensible stuff.
Now, as you say, kids can’t read it, but good pictures. [Laughs]
JC: Yeah.
GD: And there is a movement in legal that has, I mean, everybody’s still scared and everybody still wants to do it the old way. But there is… they would never do that 11-page legal paper, 8-point type, quarter-inch margin. Nobody would do that anywhere in Canada. And there were people in every province and territory. Mike Bell in the Northwest Territories was a big mover and shaker. He went to court as… what’s his name? In this booklet, his name was on the news for something just the other day. And I thought, oh, he’s still going strong. Some big court case. And he was the guy. And I was really happy to hear he was still doing it. So, you know, once… Larry Hunter, yeah.
So I think in legal, I was hired to do this. It’s not available anymore. So they’ve gone on, but again, Kathy Kaulbach. And, you know…
And it was very challenging. All the work, 99% of the time, you had to beat people over the head with a blunt instrument. And half the time they wouldn’t use it once you produced it.
Like the student loans stuff, you know, they use it until it changes. And I did one with income tax, and it certainly didn’t persist. I did… The guys—it’s almost all guys—sitting around said… you know, when they give us this, they give us maybe a month before the date when we have to have it out. And we have to read all the information and get it down and prepare the form and the guidebook. Can you imagine?
And so we did one. But what has persisted is the little boxes. And the screened background with the white where you fill it in. And if nothing else persisted, that has made a huge difference in the income tax form because you can actually fill in… Now it’s all online, so it’s all irrelevant, but…
Yeah, so that persisted. And, you know, other people were saying, I did this, this was my first act in Nova Scotia. Not only can you read that, and it’s in the order, and I got to test it. It was a perfect project.
I got paid to the nickel for the time I worked. You can read every word across. And so it shamed the phone company and all kinds of people into doing things. As Tilden shamed everybody—well, Tilden terrified everybody into doing something useful with their rental agreements because you were going to lose in court.
JC: Yeah. And that’s a lovely thing that it did work that way, but just last year, I did, as a favour for a friend, I rewrote the form people have to fill out to get a heating subsidy. We have a program in Nova Scotia to get a home heating subsidy. My friend’s old buddy, do you remember Darla Purdy? Darla’s working in Shelburne County at a women’s centre, and they give out these forms, and nobody could fill them out. So she said, “I have a friend.” So they called me up and I said, sure, you know, gratis, don’t worry about it.
And I redid their form, and that was pretty straightforward because their questions were all convoluted and, really, they were asking twice as many questions as they needed to because half of them were about something you already answered. And then I got to the back, where it had the legal disclaimers in the most God-awful legal language. So I called them up and said, “You want me to do this too? I mean, are you obligated to keep that? Like, is it part of your funding that you keep that? Because if it’s not, trust me—it can be better. And they checked with their lawyer—whoever was on their board, it’d have to be a lawyer—and she said, “Nah, you know, if you can fix it, do it.” And so I did it. And that was the first time I’d done legal. It was a hoot. And clearly that whole concept of clarity had not filtered down to “Let’s make it easy to give poor people help.” It was, “Let’s make it so opaque that they give up and freeze.” You know, like… They were happy at the end. And I don’t know what happened after that, but, you know, it’s, as I keep saying, it’s so spotty.
GD: It’s spotty.
JC: It’s just so spotty.
GD: I did the public trustee a few years back. That’s a story in itself that I don’t bother telling, but it’s wonderful. You can go and read everything on the public trustee’s page and know what it says. And so, like you say, it’s spotty. Anyway, enough on that. Maybe. Because it is big.
IC: I guess we’ve gotten to the big question.
GD: Right.
IC: What were your main roles and activities in the plain language movement? And are there any accomplishments you’re particularly proud of? Jan, you showed me your Nobody’s Perfect.
JC: I’ve been fortunate in my career that I’ve gotten to work on what turned out to be flagship projects. They didn’t start out that way, but they ended up that way. And partly because of the people who were involved saw the importance of it and were able to allow it to expand. There was Nobody’s Perfect.
GD: My granddaughter has your…
JC: Sex book?
IC: [Laughs]
GD: No.
JC: I love the sex book.
GD: She’s got… she just came in off the street. She’s gotten two out of her three kids back and is working on the third. And she, with the baby, she got…
JC: Loving Care?
GD: Loving Care.
JC: Yeah. Which is beautiful. We photographed Nova Scotian babies for it. So they’re all local babies. And, you know, they’re all local mothers. And we had so much fun with that.
But Nobody’s Perfect was… I think I started it in 1983, just as I got my master’s degree. And it has been on the top ten bestseller government publications list for all those years. And it’s used in South America. It’s been translated into a bunch of languages. And that started out as a little parenting thing. And then it morphed. And then there was a training program that went with it. And then there was a train-the-trainers program. And it just morphed into this whole engine unto itself.
But, you know, again, it fell on hard times. There was a period during which they didn’t revise it. So when they came to do this recent… The only reason they agreed to do the big update was because the first-aid section was out of date. It was dangerous, right? What was good first aid in 1983 was not good first aid in 2003. So they couldn’t give that book out anymore.
And, you know, there was that one. I did the prenatal book that they used all over Nova Scotia. I did Loving Care recently, which is another parenting book. Much updated. So much has changed. And the sex book. And I did one on drugs for preteens, for parents to talk to preteens about drugs. That was a hoot because Derek, the designer, again, he did lots of drugs. He said, Jan, none of this is going to convince a kid not to do something that’s fun. You’re not saying how much fun it is, right? And they know how much fun it is. So they’re not going to believe anything else you tell them. Which I think probably turned out to be true.
But persistently, you know, despite having an enormous amount of fun working on these projects, all of them ultimately foundered on lack of government interest sufficient to maintain their funding. Like Loving Care, it had birth to six months, six months to a year, and one to three years, and then a book for parents with information—four books. The first three they printed, the one to three years, they never printed. They put it online as a PDF. And when do you have problems as a parent? One to three.
IC: Yeah.
JC: Because, you know, when you have a baby, you feed them, you change them. It’s nice if you try and understand them, and the books were very helpful about introducing food. But where the behaviour problems start is one to three. And they printed a very limited number for a specific program, which was called Enhanced Home Visiting, and it targeted extremely high-risk parents. Wonderful program, but it can only accommodate about 10% of the people who are recommended to the program. So that whole book was rarely printed.
And then I mentioned the app—it should have been an app. So that… you know, plain language is more honoured in the breach. Like, they can talk a big game, but when it comes down to putting their money where their mouth is, everything is more important. And health promotion and prevention has—including public health—has… well, their budget doubled so that it went from 1.5% of the health budget to 3% of the health budget. So it’s like this minuscule chunk of the budget where almost all of the publications reside. And, you know, it’s an easy thing to nip off, and now it’s gone to Communications Nova Scotia. So the health proportion of their budget is even lower than the overall thing.
So, yeah. Anyway, I can’t even remember what the question was, but…
GD: Well, your flagships. And… [Laughs] Main roles and activities, yeah, so that’s it.
JC: Yeah, we produce… You know, like, the stuff that I worked on, like the sex book, have gone to conferences all over the world—public health nurses and the sexual health nurses that are in high schools took them to all kinds of conferences, and they got picked up all over the place.
So the idea of a clear, well-tested booklet is greatly appealing to other public health people. But, as far as I know, only the Yukon picked up the sex book. It was extremely controversial elsewhere.
GD: Extremely.
JC: Yeah, and in Nova Scotia…
GD: Nova Scotia people were… just got themselves into a little tizzy about it.
IC: [Laughs]
JC: Well, it was… in particular, Strait Richmond School Board. We were testing it, right? Like, it was, you know, it went through 22 drafts. And most of them were changing minor things to appease. Even the Minister of Health’s mother got a vote on what went in there. What she wanted changed was there’s a little paragraph on if your girlfriend gets pregnant, what is your responsibility. This little paragraph, and basically what we said was, it’s your responsibility to support whatever the hell she wants. And whether she wants abortion, to have the baby, or, you know, like, I listed them in alphabetical order—you know, abortion, adoption, raising the baby. She didn’t want abortion first. So we had to say raising the baby, adoption… she let us… they let us keep abortion, but it had to be the last option.
But the Strait Richmond School Board, when we were circulating the draft copies, somehow got hold—because it was a joint education and health project—somehow got hold of a copy. And the guy who was the school board chair stood up and said, “I’ve been married for 40 years, and I don’t need to know this stuff.” He raised hell, he made the front page of the newspaper, it was huge.
And then the newspaper got a copy and sent it round to a bunch of ninth graders and their parents, and they were all like, “This is great!” And this was before it was even designed. And we could not have paid for better PR. And after that the newspapers were four-square behind us. And so every time someone raised hell, they would point out what a great… We could not have asked for better publicity.
But ultimately that school board wouldn’t distribute it—wouldn’t let their kids have it. And some school boards insisted it go home in plain brown envelopes. And in Strait Richmond’s… Our local supermarket, Sobeys, gave it out. You could get it at Sobeys and Shoppers Drug Mart, the local Shoppers. You could get it there, but you couldn’t get it at school.
So that was because it was sex—not because it was plain language.
IC: [Laughs]
JC: But it was plain language, and that’s how they knew it was sex.
GD: [Laughs]
JC: But, yeah, they were great fun. But honestly, whether they had any lasting impact in terms of, “Oh, let’s make everything clear!”
IC: [Laughs]
GD: My two interesting things, because of where I was working, both gave me the opportunity to do demonstration projects. So when I was at CLIC, we did nothing but demonstration. You know, we put together a lexicon and we did all kinds of demonstration, so… in important places. And that was really nice. We did an OHIP thing that I think never saw the light of day. Often things ran into a bureaucrat who said [nonverbal gesture]. And that was the end of that.
And Department of Education here, I got to do a number of things, again, because I knew somebody at the hospital, at the VG [Victoria General], Paul Girard, got me to… introduced me to people in areas where you had to have something that was comprehensible. What do you do for exercises after a heart attack? So, you know, I did a little brochure for that. It was mostly line drawings.
That was the other interesting thing in literacy. We discovered that conceptual drawings mean nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. They have to be representational. People without good literacy don’t have a clue what that nice line with a little thing in the arms means mother and baby. It means just some odd lines.
So, that was nice. And the power bill was brilliant. I mean, it just changed those bills, and it was so nice. Oh, ISANS. It was called MISA in those days—Metro Immigrant Settlement Association. But they were a demonstration project, and we did a wonderful thing. The woman, the designer, was another one of those wonderful plain language artist designer people, but she died of cancer a few years ago. That was sad.
So I did all kinds of those things that went out into the community and were things for people to use, which was nice. This was really great, and it really made a difference. And it was the model across the country, and it went overseas with the international stuff and got picked up in other countries, and, as I said, enormously grateful to Kathy Kaulbach because that’s why it’s so brilliant.
IC: Yeah, the Youth Criminal Justice Act Pocket Guide.
GD: Yes.
JC: When it goes to another country, do you have any idea whether the plain language continues as it’s translated?
GD: The European Union is on fire. They don’t do anything that isn’t plain language ever. That’s the place, that’s the centre of the universe for plain language at this time. And all the European countries are just doing it. They’re just doing it. It’s brilliant.
This is my heart’s joy. I worked with this guy and we went… Right from the very beginning.
He and I started right at the beginning. We went to the police, we went to the—what do you call it—legal aid offices. And we went everywhere in the legal community to see who used it and how they used it, the first one.
And so we began making adjustments there. Discovered that the people who use it the most— legal education use it a lot, but the people who use it the most are judges. Because you’re not a Youth Criminal Court judge. You are a judge who does Youth Criminal Court when it comes up. It doesn’t come up in your district that often.
One of the main judges we talked to said, it’s always in my desk. When I’m in court, it’s in court, and I look things up when I’m in trial.
IC: Wow.
GD: So that’s what we said. “Wow.” So we made it work for them. And so plain language, as you know, is what’s appropriate for who has to use it. So there’s a lot of stuff in here for judges. There’s a whole section for judges at the back. And we really worked intensively with everybody on this. And it was so much fun. We didn’t have a timeline and we didn’t have a budget. We just worked until we were finished. Never had that much fun in my life. It was… I think it took us eight months to a year.
JC: It seemed like longer.
GD: No, it was longer. You’re right. It went on and on and on.
JC: Because I see Gwen sporadically. And for the longest time, every time I saw her, she was working on that! And it just seemed like it went on and on and on. And it was so complicated. She would occasionally send me a sentence and say, what can we do about this word? Can you think of anything we can do with this word?
GD: With this one, I would just, when I got to that stage, I would just go in the room and shut the door with Mona Lynch, who was in charge of it, and I’d say, tell me what you’re trying to say. And she’d say it, and I’d write it down. And it would go in the book. That worked every time with her.
But, yeah, this one was—it was just a joy. And it’s really useful. And it’s well used. And it’s colour coded in three colours. It’s got green and purple. Purple is the new one. Green is the act and the numbers is the act. And plain is the YCJA that it was working from. And the old… what was it called—the act? Anyway, it’s one of the best acts in the world. But the problem isn’t understanding it. The problem is implementing it. And it’s provincially… it’s nationally mandated and provincially put into practice, and the problem is the provinces don’t give it the money and the staff to implement it. So you’ve got this great act that doesn’t get implemented. And then everybody’s all… their knickers in a knot because… “The act is no good.” The act is brilliant. It’s world famous. It’s implementation, and that’s the hard thing. Anyway, that’s my favourite things.
JC: Yeah, you find that, like Gwen was saying about the judges using that when initially perhaps they hadn’t thought that would be the case. When I did Nobody’s Perfect all those years ago, one of my neighbours was a doctor, and she had no idea I was working on this. But she was one of the people who used it with her kids and in her work. She worked at the IWK [Health Centre], and she said, when she found out that… I said, “Oh!” and she said, “Oh man, you know, like, you’ve got the baby crying, you know, like in your arms. I’m a pediatrician—I should know what the hell to do. But, like, my brain is a cabbage.” And this makes it, you know… And she gave it out.
IC: Can I look at it, Gwen?
GD: Oh, yes.
JC: But it was sweet. I never expected that a doctor would use it. I thought they might read it and like it and give it to their patients. But I never thought it would be a doctor with the baby on the hip and the, you know, reading the dark print because that’s all her eyes can see at that point. But it’s true, you know, that…
And the other insight that I always found fascinating was I taught prenatal classes for a long time. Everybody’s stupid when they shift areas.
GD: Yes.
JC: We had an actual astrophysicist PhD in our… Pat, my friend Pat and I did the classes. I honestly think he didn’t know where babies came from. I swear to God, I don’t know how his wife got pregnant. He was… and he was brilliant. He was a brilliant astrophysicist. He just didn’t really care about anything else. And, you know, you find that… I found that consistently like with parenting, all these really smart people, but they’d never thought about this. And so when they tried to read one of the, like… Penelope Leach was the big name back in the ’80s. She had a tone, and it was brilliant. I mean, there was nothing Penelope didn’t cover in tiny print in three columns per page with little pictures here and there. But they would try and read that book, and it wasn’t their reading skills. It was as if they didn’t have the background for it. I mean, in my thesis, I have a wonderful quote from the US Department of Agriculture, which is, “Never underestimate the intelligence of your reader…” No—“Overestimate the background knowledge of your reader and never underestimate their intelligence” so that… They’re not dumb. They just don’t have the background knowledge to support this new information that’s coming in, which makes it really, really difficult. And thus, a plain language book is accessible to them in a way that’s something more appropriate to their reading skills wouldn’t be.
IC: Right.
GD: Winterowd, W-I-N-T-E-R-O-W-D, literacy guy, did a brilliant demonstration of that with a laundry thing. So you are reading along, and you don’t know what that is…
IC: Yes, I’ve heard of that. Yes, yes.
GD: You’ve seen that. It is so good. I used to present that in workshops to lawyers because they’d go [non-verbal expression] and then I’d say, it’s doing your laundry. And the thing that was dramatic about it, more dramatic than just that you can’t understand it… You give us these… [gesturing to the bills]
IC: No, no, no, no, no, no, I can cover it. I took a look. I’m good. I’m fine.
GD: No, you don’t need to do that.
IC: I’m fine. Thank you for taking the time. It’s really the least I could do.
JC: Thank you.
IC: No, thank you.
JC: Because we can talk for free. We’re pretty hard to shut up.
GD: It’s very fun to actually tune in on this stuff now that I’ve left it all behind. The thing is that nobody ever really gets it afterward. If you don’t have that envelope, and that was Mike Bell from Northwest Territories, he said… he was going on about that. You have to give the context. And if people haven’t got the context, they can’t get the content. And they never get it. They never get it. He was talking about doing a trial with a First Nations woman, and they said something about arson. And she said, yeah, because she was arsin’ around, right? She was, like, arsin’ around.
IC: Ohhhhh.
GD: And she was convicted because she said yes to arson. And that’s what she was doing. And you know, you’ve got to work on that level, not your level.
Anyway, it was so nice. Anyway, you’ve got one more question. What was the challenges in the ’90s?
JC: You ride is already late, isn’t it.
GD: No, quarter to eleven.
JC: Oh, it’s 20 after 10?
GD: Yeah.
JC: Okay, we’re good, then.
IC: Yeah, we’re good. But you’ve addressed some of this already.
GD: Yeah, we’ve addressed most of it, yeah, I think we have.
IC: For instance, the training only applied to one person, and it never got spread out. And then also the funding, that there wasn’t persistent funding to maintain programs that you created.
GD: And people didn’t believe in it, because they had a vested interest in sounding smart, and you still hear them on the radio. You go, “Malaprop, malaprop.” Anyway.
And the… What was the fourth one? I had a fourth one. We were still inventing it. We were still discovering it. And so were they all over the place. The energy was in that… And for me, the whole thing is always about, in this, access to justice, but just access to your democratic world. And that… it’s community access. It’s access for all people.
I did the whopping cough, pertussis shot, poster. That was really fun. I had two sentences to work with. [Laughs]
JC: I did one for the breastfeeding program. Peggy Eisenman was the designer, and they had like… I mean, a good poster should have, like, two words on it. This had more than two words, but not too much more. And that is… my posters are up.
GD: And I did one for the doctors, and one for the people coming into the office. So there were three parts to it, and it was really energizing. It was really nice, and I’m hoping that people extrapolate that to all. I mean, it should be going on with the measles thing, right?
They should be extrapolating from that whooping cough thing.
JC: What were your two sentences?
GD: Oh, I have no idea. But they were short sentences. Two short sentences. And I saw the poster all over the place. It was really nice. It was in my doctor’s office and everywhere. And nice to know that they used it. That was the point, yeah.
So I think those were the challenges in the ’90s, yeah? Yeah. Boy, the biggest one was just plain ego.
IC: [Laughs] That’s still a problem!
JC: Yeah, there’s a lot of that. There’s a lot of that in health. For damn sure. You’ve no doubt experienced this. There’s a lot of that.
GD: The Department of Environment is very bad for that. They do not want you to do anything to their words. They’re being mandated, and they don’t like it. And they often—not just me—they wouldn’t use it.
IC: So we got to the last question, which is how you feel about the movement today. And so far, the people that I’ve interviewed, some of them are optimistic. They say, you know, there didn’t used to be training programs and now there are training programs. Some are finding that they have to explain less what plain language is, because there’s more of a recognition about what it is and why it’s important.
And then I did talk to some people who were pessimistic about the movement, saying that there used to actually be a political push, top-down leadership from the government. And, you know, that little booklet that you said—the Plain Language: Clear and Simple—the federal government handed out. In the Harper era, it went out of print and is not readily available. I rebuilt it, and I have it on my website, so people can download it. But it’s not readily available from the government, anyway. [2026 update: The booklet is now available on the Government of Canada site, using the digital file I rebuilt.] So there was a little bit of pessimism in that sense, saying that there used to actually be a movement, right? And now there really isn’t—there’s no coordinated effort to promote it. So I’m curious to know how you feel about where the plain language movement is today.
GD: Yeah, you obviously talked to Cheryl [Stephens], and, you know, she has that wonderful page, but I don’t go on it anymore, because they get impatient ’cause I never post anything. But I don’t have anything to say. I just find it interesting, but I don’t have time to read it anymore—I’m doing fiction now.
JC: I don’t know. I would say I have extremely mixed feelings about it.
GD: Yeah, I would say that, too.
JC: On the one hand, as Gwen would know better than I ’cause she actually worked in it, is computers—online stuff. Like, there’s a lot of usability testing that goes on. There’s a lot of what’s clear on a screen. There’s a lot of interest. Bullet points became really common.
Mind you, now, there are still really crappy websites, but there’s a lot of better ones. Like that one… who was it that found, there was a plain language one…? Our plain language group put up our own little website, and after it got up, somebody found one that was basically white with, like, three words on each page. It was the best, perfectly clear thing ever.
And print has become less financially viable for governments. And as was our experience with the street-involved kids, they’re not interested in what’s written on paper. They’ve never had a happy experience with paper, but they’ve had lots of fun with their phones. And they can read on their phones in a way that they won’t on their… So in that sense, I’m optimistic because governments, being what they are, it’s cheaper to put things online.
Now, if they could just hire good enough tech people to put it online in a way that makes it usable, because they are so cheap, they always get the people nobody else wants to hire.
IC: [Laughs]
JC: So in that sense, I’m optimistic that there is a… And the literacy levels are not getting any better. And so it’s becoming more apparent that, “Oh, it’d be cheaper to make our stuff easier to read than to put money into educating people so they can read.”
So in that sense, the fact that there’s a little synergy with another medium, so to speak, is encouraging. But every time there’s a tax cut, it’s not building roads that goes. It’s some little corner of public health or some little corner of communications that, you know, something doesn’t get printed, something doesn’t get… “Oh, well, yeah, I know we told you we could use colour pictures, but we’re not going to. It’s going to be black and white and ugly.”
And, you know, like… So I’m pessimistic in the sense that I don’t think there’s any more real commitment on the part of the governments, of the people who produce these materials than there has ever been. Except, again, for isolated cases where it’s so clearly in their interest, like Gwen’s power bill and the contract. It was so clearly in their interest to do this, that they do it.
But if it’s only in the interest of the reader, you know, like in health—you must know the social determinants of health. It’s the big, coming thing, and we’ve been talking about this since the mid-’80s. And now suddenly governments have glommed on to the terminology, but they have not glommed on to the idea of what that means.
And, you know, so they’re not putting any more money into prenatal. They’re not putting any more money into early childhood education. They’re not putting any more money into making sure parents have some help, the ones who need it. They eliminated a reading program in Nova Scotia that was brilliantly successful.
They eliminated it—and that was the NDP—and replaced it with something much worse, but cheaper, way cheaper. So in that sense, I’m pessimistic, but then, you know, there is this whole… The tech stuff is the sexy stuff, so if that’s a little more usable, they’ll go there.
GD: But the EU is my source of hope. I think it’s amazing and moving.
JC: And vulnerable right now. Politically, the EU is so vulnerable.
GD: Well, I think they did well with that recent election. I know there were upstarts, but… Anyway, so that’s where my little hope lies. And I think there are… I don’t know if I believe it or you believe it, the 100-monkey thing, but there was this old study that has fallen into disrepute, but it was that if sufficient number of monkeys knew who never washed their food, when the 100th monkey learned to wash its food, it kind of did a mind transfer. But that mind transfer does exist. Any significant invention in the history of the world has been invented in various places all around the world. And it’s who gets to the press first that gets credited with it.
So things change across our unconscious mind because we pick up more publications that are in plain language, because it’s called for more times, because you run into the concept more times, and also because somehow or other it filters through the atmosphere. I think it’s taking more hold. And I think there is an inevitability about going forward. Even… No, I won’t say it…
IC: [Laughs]
GD: But anyway, yes. So. [About her watch] This is five minutes fast. I don’t know why I do that. I’ve always done it.
It was just really fun to do this. So is that good?
IC: Those are my questions.
GD: Exhaustive!
IC: Do you have anything to add?
GD: Do we have anything to add… But, you know, politics gets in the way of almost everything. And the literacy section is gone, and it was the best thing since sliced bread. But there’s always somebody who comes with the new old idea, you know.
JC: Yeah, that’s true.
GD: So it is entirely possible that we will continue to grow. And that online forum that Cheryl started really is international. It’s quite amazing. It’s quite wonderful, and I love it. It’s just that you need someone to curate it, and everybody’s so busy. She stopped curating it, so it’s not so active anymore. But nevertheless, there’ll be something else come along.
JC: Yeah. Yeah. I just get weary waiting for things to come to fruition. I’m 71.
GD: I’m 73.
JC: Yeah, she’s getting older than me now.
GD: [Laughs] It’s a shame, but it’s happening.
JC: And I spent most of my adult life working for women’s reproductive health in one form or another, and Prepared Childbirth, and then we got midwifery into Nova Scotia, and abortion rights, and all that stuff. And things come around. Like now, you know, in the US, it’s like regressing. And after 23 years of relentless lobbying, Nova Scotia adopted midwifery legislation and screwed up implementation beyond hope. So my experience has been that a groundswell push in one direction can be initially successful, but without serious commitment on the part of the people who have grudgingly accepted your years of research and study, and that yes, in fact, midwives aren’t witches, they don’t kill babies, they have the appropriate two nipples, you know…
GD and IC: [Laughs]
JC: You know, and get it implemented. OK, you’ve got the politicians on side, but you’ve still got the doctors. You’ve still got the doctors who—this is a threat to their power, right? And you’ve still got the nurses, because if the midwife is delivering it, what do I do? If she stays for the whole birth—the doctor only comes in for the last 20 minutes—if she stays, well, what do I do? What’s my job now? And that was a huge thing. So in a sense, I feel the same way about plain language. Even if we get buy-in, we’re not really sure what they’re buying into.
You know, like years ago, there was a pain researcher called Melzack who was very, very famous in the area of pain research, and he did a study on pain in childbirth, and he considered a natural childbirth to be a childbirth with a spinal, because you were awake. So like the whole research was…
Server: I’m going to bring my change purse over, and I’ll make change for you.
IC: You don’t need to.
Server: No? You’re all right? Have a great day.
JC: Thanks. And he conflated what the common understanding of natural childbirth, which is unmedicated childbirth, with conscious versus unconscious.
IC: Oh my gosh.
JC: And it was… and yet, it was cited all over the place. It was a big deal. I read about the paper in the newspaper, and then had to go to the… This was back when you couldn’t just look things up online. You had to go down to the medical library and find the appropriate journal and photocopy the pages. And it was appalling. And, you know, so things like that happen, and I expect them to happen in plain language, because what’s, you know, I worked with a woman briefly on a pamphlet, and she was the PR person for the IWK, and she said, the problem, Jan, is that everybody thinks they can write.
IC: Yeah.
JC: You know whether or not you can draw, right? Artists don’t have this problem, but writers do, because everybody thinks they can write. And they don’t see why they should bring in somebody else to write when they can write perfectly well, thanks. And, you know, I suspect that there’s a lot of that between, you know, recognition and the implementation of something we would consider appropriate and respectable applications of plain language theory, right?
GD: Well, and lots of people don’t believe there’s a theory, so. Um, I did a website, the whole website, for the registrar—I will not remember what the act is—but the act came in about three years ago that said that anybody who wanted to come and… through a professional organization in Nova Scotia, and we’re talking hairdressers to lawyers to everybody, every professional organization in Nova Scotia had to have a website that was appropriate to be understood by anyone who wanted to come, who was interested in coming, so that there would be no mystery in how you applied and what all the steps were involved to get to be… Now, I don’t know what all’s gone on, but I did her page, her whole site, and it was exciting to do. So that’s there, again, a demonstration. I love demonstration projects.
Anyway, your car’s coming.
IC: Thank you so much!
JC: Oh, you’re welcome. And we don’t often get to natter on.