EditorThis is a near-verbatim transcript of an in-person interview I did with Nicole Watkins Campbell in Vancouver, BC, on July 25, 2019, where she was visiting from 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 her views at the time, those views might have evolved since the interview took place.
In this interview, Nicole refers to interviews I did with other Halifax-based plain language practitioners before I spoke with her. As of June 6, 2026, I am still working with those interviewees to finalize aspects of their transcripts. I will link to those transcripts when I get approval to post them.
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IC: OK! Well, thank you, Nicole, for taking the time to talk to me.
NWC: Oh, thank you for asking me. It’s just funny to be doing it in Vancouver instead of Halifax.
IC: [Laughs] The reason I’m doing this project is because I found when I was looking through histories of what the plain language movement went through, that there wasn’t really much written about Canada. And the period that I’m studying, sort of between 1980 to 1995, is what one of my professors called a historical rain shadow in that it isn’t old enough to be interesting to put online, but it isn’t new enough to be already online.
NWC: Yeah.
IC: And so I thought this was a good opportunity to reach out to people, especially because a lot of people are reaching retirement age and not really active anymore… I wanted to be able to capture all of that before it was too late.
NWC: Right.
IC: So, thank you again for speaking with me. I’d like to find out a little bit more about how you got involved in the movement and what inspired you to join.
NWC: Right. So I first became interested in plain language sometime in the 1990s, but I don’t remember exactly when. So I was an editor for the Government of Nova Scotia. My full-time job was to edit government documents. I knew that a lot of those documents were sort of boring because some of them were just government annual reports.
But there were other things as well that I knew were… I just found that when I was reading to edit them, I had to read through two or three times.
IC: Right.
NWC: And I think it may actually have just been purely selfish motives—I just really felt like people should not be writing like that, especially since there was a huge amount of work required to make them accessible to the public in a way that I understood accessibility. And I had no understanding of accessibility. I just knew that if I had trouble reading them, other people had trouble reading them.
So that was my initial motivation, I think. Didn’t have really that much contact with plain language anything. Most of it was just newsletters I got on good writing style and on editing. I don’t even remember what Editors Canada was publishing at the time. There was The Canadian Style, so I had a copy of that, which probably advocated for plain language. Of course, everybody has Strunk and White, which advocates in some senses for plain language and in some senses not for plain language. But anyway, between those things and the Chicago Manual of Style, which we lived on, that sort of had me working toward clearer writing, plainer writing. The idea of testing writing didn’t come in until a little bit later.
IC: OK. And when did you become aware that plain language was a thing?
NWC: We were asked to rewrite a set of form letters, a hundred form letters, for a program that gave money to single mostly moms. The government had started a new program to get these moms out of… to get them off social assistance by helping them get the funds from their non-paying spouses. And it was called the… it’s now called the maintenance.…I’ll have to think of the name later.
But the program connected with these women, got information on their non-paying spouses, started flowing some income to them, and meanwhile chased down the spouses to try and get the income from them to flow it directly to the women. So it was a really good project idea. The program had a really bad relationship with those moms, and it did not know why. But once I looked at the form letters, I knew why, because they were using the same family benefits form letters they’ve been using for literally 30 years at that point.
IC: Oh, wow.
NWC: And they had done almost nothing to edit them. So I did a first crack at the letters, then I did a second round of… once they really began to get into changing the program, they decided to revamp all of the letters again. And at that point I decided, I had heard about a woman named Gwen Davies, who I think you interviewed. And at that point we said, “Well, let’s bring this woman in. She knows something about this thing called plain language.” And we brought her in. And that’s what sort of really opened my eyes to what the possibilities were.
Anyway, that’s how it started. She, in doing her project, Gwen just went the full frontal. So she brought a bunch of women into a place, she interviewed them to find out what the problems were. She went back, she did some drafts, she did some testing, and then she brought them… brought back, probably—I don’t know exactly what her process was, but she went back and did a final review of the letters to make sure they were the right thing. And it actually changed the relationship between the program and the moms. So, probably for two reasons. And I think one was they had actually communicated with them in person, and the other was because they finally had letters that meant something, and reflected, and acknowledged that they were talking to people. Because the earlier letters were really, really, really bureaucratic, corporate-speak letters. They didn’t acknowledge that they were written by people, they didn’t acknowledge that they were being sent to people. It was just a really old writing style.
IC: And once you went through that project with Gwen, you, I guess, discovered the process of plain language, and then did you incorporate that into other aspects of your work?
NWC: We did. We couldn’t do the testing the way she did it. We didn’t have the skill in-house, and we didn’t have the funds to bring her in for everything. So when we could, we brought her in. We also were aware of two other women, Jan Catano, and I can’t remember who her partner was at the time, but she was working with another woman, possibly a graphic designer. They were doing projects for the Department of Health.
[Background noise]
NWC: I think we’re going to have to move. We’ll see.
IC: We’ll see. Yeah.
NWC: So they were doing projects for the Department of Health, and they were doing that full process as well. And so when we were doing projects for public health, or health promotion, anything like that, that’s when we would bring in someone external, if the funds were there, and if the project timelines allowed for it. Other than that, the parts of the process that we took and made use of were just, you know, having some better understanding of who the audience was, at least talking to the client and trying to assess it.
They knew who their audience was. And then just doing those parts of the process—and then using the best skills that we had to edit. And testing wasn’t always an option. We did it when we could. And then working with people who had some skill, had demonstrated some skill in plain language graphic design.
IC: And then at that point, did you get connected with the greater plain language community, either within the Atlantic region or other places in Canada?
NWC: Yes, but in Halifax at the time, it really was about four women.
IC: [Laughs] Right.
NWC: Like, there just… there really were not other people doing it. And there weren’t even other people at that time who said, “Oh, I do plain language. I have a plain language practice.” Nobody was even saying it then except those people.
And then eventually, you know, into the early 2000s, you started seeing people say, “Oh, I do plain language, I’m a plain language editor, I’m a plain language writer.” Whether they were or not, I don’t even know.
IC: Right.
NWC: But it wasn’t until then that people started saying things like that.
Yeah, because at that time, Halifax is such a small community. We had a lot of people who could take a document and make it substantially plainer. And who understood who some of the audiences were that the government was communicating with. And so, you know, if we couldn’t hire Jan or Gwen, we would hire some of these other writers and just talk them through the process of making sure the text was really plain.
But, you know, without testing, you just don’t really know if you’re there. And sometimes testing involved just sending it around the office or, you know, asking some other people. Because even in our office, in a way, we had a test audience because our office was a publishing office. So we had a couple of editors, we had a group of graphic designers, we had people who dealt with the printing companies, people who were purchasers, people who dealt with suppliers. So we did have a range of people working in the office. All of them were fairly comfortable dealing with print materials, but most of them had no subject expertise. So you had to kind of balance off that possible lack of ability to deal with print materials. But we also had conversations with Literacy Nova Scotia, which at that point was still a branch of the Department of Education. Or at least very closely affiliated with the Department of Education. So we had some expertise there.
IC: And when you started using plain language principles with your own documents in house, did you find that you had pretty good buy-in from your team and from managers, or did you encounter any resistance?
NWC: You would have some resistance. Some people were comfortable. I remember editing a report on child mental health that was written by a psychiatrist. He was meeting with the graphic designer the day I showed him the edit, which of course I did in red pencil. That’s what you did. And I walked away to photocopy something. When I came back, he was looking at it. He had his back to the door, so he didn’t see me. He was looking at it and he was saying to the graphic designer, “My God, it looks like it’s bleeding to death.”
IC: [Laughs]
NWC: Which only someone from the Department of Health would say. But he was a lovely man. He was surprised by the number of changes. But he had written it thinking about some of his colleagues. And I knew that the report was for the public, not for psychiatrists. So when we were going through the changes, there were things he would resist because he’d say, “No, psychiatrists would never say it that way.” And then we’d have to go back and say, “You’re not writing for psychiatrists.”
Social workers were also sometimes resistant to changes. Certainly early on they were. And I’m only calling out social workers because I just remember working with them. Probably lots of people did. At the Department of Health, they had an in-house publishing unit. And they were well into plain language because they had worked with Jan and her business partner for a while. So they really had a good understanding of it. And also, you know, you’d have public health nurses coming back and saying, “This is great, but nobody can read it. I keep having to explain to people what’s in these brochures.”
So they had a really good understanding there. So in a lot of places in the Department of Health, mostly public health and a little bit of primary health, you didn’t have that much resistance. It was other places in the department. But once you got into higher levels of the department and management, it was there.
And Diane Macgregor has probably told you this, but she still runs into that problem where she trains people to write. They do the writing. And then it comes back from their managers. Yeah, so she mentioned that to you. So, you know, we had a little bit of that, but… I guess I thought that would be gone by now.
IC: [Laughs]
NWC: It’s not. But yeah, we did have a little bit of that.
But I think the biggest thing was the support that we got in Communications Nova Scotia. So the agency itself saw value in it. And I was actually allowed, when I spoke to the… I made a presentation in Houston. I guess it started with a policy. I wanted plain language to become policy. And there was support for that internally. And I was able to bring together a group of people from the Red Tape Reduction Agency and from someone who was actually centrally located in government—they must have been with the policy and program branch. Government’s Legislative Council, Chief Legislative Council participated on that committee. So we had a real range of people who were involved. But the Chief Legislative Council only got involved to make sure that we didn’t try to change legislation. [Laughs]
But we had people from the Department of Justice and Health and probably Community Services, as well as some of these other more business-related areas. And we developed a policy—someone from the Department of Labour who had real experience in policy actually wrote the policy for us, you know, based on what was happening in the meetings. And we developed a policy. What the government decided to do was include the policy in Communications Nova Scotia’s own policy area.
So it lived on our website for years. We have a plain language policy. This is what it says. And it was incorporated in our style guide, of course. So anytime someone sent us a document and said, “Oh, we don’t like these changes,” we were able to say, “Well, actually it’s official government style, and this is what we’re going to do.”
IC: So it’s through Communications Nova Scotia.
NWC: Yeah.
IC: But didn’t propagate to other departments or ministries.
NWC: That’s right. Yeah, it didn’t become official government policy, which was our first hope. But when you think about the range of things that a provincial government deals with, it’s not really surprising this one didn’t get priority. And it’s completely appropriate that it be housed with Communications Nova Scotia because almost all government publications or communication or material that goes out goes through Communications Nova Scotia. There are a few things that departments will produce that don’t go through Communications Nova Scotia. Most of those tend to be in-house things. And if they do do something like that and someone reports a complaint, of course, they then have to go through that Communications Nova Scotia process.
But the government recently redid its entire website. And I don’t know if Diane talked about this.
IC: A little bit, I believe.
NWC: Right. So the website for a long time did not reflect those principles. Mostly it didn’t. It was just… by the time we were really selling it, at that time we were selling it to departments project by project. And by the time there was any kind of broad-based awareness of plain language, the government website had tens of thousands of pages. And it just couldn’t all be pulled back.
About a few years ago they decided to revamp the whole thing. And the language that will come up will be in very plain language. Did you speak to Catherine Buckie while you were in Halifax? So she is also a plain language person. She has a master’s degree in education, and it’s based on literacy. So she works as a plain language contractor for government. And she was one of the writers that they hired to do the rewriting or editing or whatever needed to be done to make sure that that language on their government website is clear and plain and that a wide variety of people will be able to read it. They’re also going into accessibility in other ways as well. So Diane probably talked about that. But that’s today.
IC: And yeah, so I guess my second question and the list of questions I sent was, “What were the key events, do you think, culturally, politically, socially, that allowed the plain language movement to Canada to develop way it did?” Or at least in Atlantic Canada or Nova Scotia or whatever you’re familiar with.
NWC: Yeah, I would say the availability of experienced practitioners is probably one of the bigger driving forces, because people just didn’t have a lot of awareness of it. At that time, Nova Scotia was… In the late ’80s, early ’90s, Nova Scotia was starting to have a bit of an economic recession. By the time 2000 hit, it was not deep, but the government was just completely distracted with everything. And most people were just completely distracted with companies leaving the area, oil up, oil down. There was just a lot of things going on economically, and I think that’s what really captured people’s attention. People were losing their jobs, government had to shed employees, the federal government laid off 45,000 people across the country, a bunch of those who were in Atlantic Canada—I think 8,000. It was difficult.
But I would say another thing that really encouraged people to think about it was that election in the US with the butterfly ballot when George W. Bush was elected. So that was on CNN, and it was all over the place. And then people started realizing that the way things are designed can really have an impact on your life. So that was another thing that sort of made people, when we were talking about plain language, we would mention that and people were suddenly a little more aware of it.
Also, when we were doing the policy, one thing that I started to talk about was, I went to the plain language conference in Houston. I don’t even know how I heard about it, but I did, and I thought, I’m going to go and I’m going to talk about this policy. And so the government then, again, thgeir awareness increased because they realized that there was an international conference that was actually interested in what we do, because my talk was accepted. And the government realized, “OK, this is part of something bigger.” So that helped internally. That and the butterfly ballot. But I think the butterfly ballot was really the big thing. At that time, it was the big thing.
IC: Wow. And we sort of talked a little bit about pockets of resistance. Did you meet any other challenges? Did you find any other challenges when you were trying to introduce plain language or talking to people about plain language?
NWC: People like the idea of plain language on the surface. They really do. The process, most people find it difficult. And it’s just those basic human reasons that people don’t like to be heavily edited, whether it’s for plain language or anything else. They love the idea of plain language. They love the idea of things being simpler. They don’t want it to apply to them, and they start looking for reasons for it not to. And the first one is, “I don’t have the budget.” Well, we can find a way to do it affordably. “It doesn’t apply to my audience. I have a very specific audience.” Your audience wants to be able to read your writing too. And then, of course, we’ve just had that recent research that was done in the US where they found that the higher someone’s level of education, the more interested they were in easier reading. So that’s something that I’ll incorporate in conversations that I have now.
But at the time, really, it was… You know, people use jargon for a whole bunch of reasons. And they write the way they do for a whole bunch of reasons. And meanness, in my experience, is never one of them. It’s always, and it’s often, fear. Fear that they won’t be heard the way they want to be heard.
“I have a very specific message and I know how I’ve been successful delivering it to the group of people that I talk to all the time.” And talking to another group of people, they cannot put themselves in those people’s shoes. And so then they fear that if they communicate to these people differently, first of all, I think they don’t think there’ll be that much loss of understanding. And then they fear that if they communicate to this group of people differently, this group of people is going to say, “Hey, wait a minute, that’s not what you told us.” That’s one thing they worry about.
The other thing they worry about is that their peers will think to themselves, “Wait a minute. You know better than that. You know how to talk about this in this different way. You don’t need to be saying, you know, ‘do’ when you mean ‘facilitate.’” That kind of thing, right?
And you can watch people. If you look at people’s faces when you’re going through your edits with them, you can actually see that they’re starting to feel stressed. And my impression is that that stress comes from fear. Lack of being heard the way you want to be heard. You spend, and I think, I don’t know whether this resonates with you or not, but I think when you talk to people who have years and years of work experience and years and years dedicated to developing their education and their understanding and their knowledge, it’s really hard to let that go and start speaking in a different, what is essentially a different language. It’s like asking them to present in French and giving them 10-minutes’ notice. “Here, use these words. Go.” And you can see that they feel intimidated by it.
And, yeah, I would say that’s the biggest resistance. You can overcome that resistance slowly, but it takes a while to build up the trust. And even then, they’ll still come back with funny little things. Like, can we cut the period outside the brackets? Really? You have a PhD in law. You really want me to make that change?
IC: [Laughs] Yeah, at some point you’ve just got to pick your battles.
NWC: Yeah. I always think to myself, it’s just loss of control. It’s just fear and loss of control. Writers are people.
IC: And when you went to the conference in Houston, what were the reactions to your presentation about the policy?
NWC: People were wildly enthusiastic, actually. And it was a really small conference, so it was not like… I don’t know how many people will be at the coming plain language conference, but you know, at Clarity, there were what, 500 people? Most of them were lawyers.
The conference in Houston was 50 people. We were from six countries, but there were only 50 people. And some of them were lawyers and some of them were not. There was a woman there from an insurance company. There was me from a government. The people from Sweden were from either the Swedish government or an agency associated with the Swedish government.
And when I think about it, that would be most of the people. There was a guy from South Africa who may have had a legal background, but I think really was just a writer. So that’s who it was. But they really all could see the value of having government policy that said, “Really, you have to write this way.” There were a couple of people from the US who were from either a government agency or from an agency that’s associated with government agency or with the government. Joanne Locke is a person who comes to mind. And I can’t remember whether she was in government or out of government, but anyway. So that’s who was there. The US government had some policy at that point. So everybody understood. There’s value in doing that. There’s value in a government saying, “This is what we stand for, and this is how we’re going to communicate with people.”
IC: You said you don’t remember how you found out about the conference. Is that conference the first time you were connected internationally to other plain language practitioners?
NWC: Yeah. In fact, I don’t think I had even met any of the people I met there before that. And it was just such, you know how it is, you go to a conference sometimes and suddenly the whole world looks completely different. And it did. And it was really useful. I mean, it got me through all those conversations with people where they say, “Do we really need to go through all of this?” “Yes. And here are the 50 people around the world who agree with me.” [Laughs]
IC: There’s lots more than 50 now! So the last formal question I have for you, although you’ve said a lot of interesting things that I’d like to go back to, is how do you feel about the plain language movement now? And the reason I pose this question is that people that I’ve talked to so far, some of them are really enthusiastic about where the plain language movement is, because there’s now formal training, you can get certificates for plain language, there’s more awareness, there’s less of a fight. And then other people are less enthusiastic or more pessimistic about the situation because when they were involved it was a concerted movement. And there were people actually pushing for policy change the way you were pushing for policy change. And now there seems to be less of that. So I’d like to know what you think of where the plain language movement, as a political movement, is today.
NWC: I think that a lot of the people who have been involved in plain language for a long time are still a little bit activist at heart. I know I constantly have to remove that part of my motivation when I’m talking to people about why this is a good thing to do—so that I don’t say things like, “It’s just the right thing to do. Just do it.”
IC: [Laughs]
NWC: You know, it’s maturing. At first it was a small group of people who were passionately committed. And it’s growing and then the more people you have involved in something, the more likely you are to have people disagreeing over what’s the next thing to happen. And it happens with all movements. So it’s just maturing as a movement. I have to say I am thrilled because I remember my husband saying at one point, “Wow, you are on the edge of something really new, really different, you’re on the cutting edge, you’re really going to be able to do things with this in your career.” And I was thinking, “Well, I hope so. I hope it doesn’t fade out.” [Laughs] So I’m really glad that didn’t happen.
I do find now quite exciting. I’m not sure how I feel about the idea of international standards. In a way, I really love it. But that’s how my brain works. I like things organized and categorized and the idea of having it standardized in a province, standardized in a country, standardized internationally is really good. Reading Cheryl [Stephens]’s work, I realized that there will be some tricks and some hurdles that have to be overcome in trying to have an international standard that goes across a variety of cultures with a whole variety of ways of looking at things. That’s going to be tricky.
I also know that the Government of Canada has had a plain language policy for 30 years now, maybe more? If you look at any federal government website, you have to ask yourself, “Where are the plain language people?” And if you talk to people in government who are editors and communicators or whatever, they will tell you that when they’re talking to their superiors, they don’t even want to hear about plain language. They just want to get it done. Just do it. I wrote it this way. Don’t question me.
Now, that’s probably in pockets. Because some things the federal government do are really good. I have to say, the income tax form is more complicated. Doing your taxes is more complicated. The form is easier to read than it was 30 years ago. I remember the old forms. [Laughs] We’ve improved.
So they’re doing some things as well. And I know they’ve made changes to the Income Tax Act because two people who presented at that conference 30 years ago worked in the federal Department of Justice. And that’s one of the things they were thinking about doing, was starting to revise parts of that act. So I know that we’re making progress.
I also know that some of the progress that we make is a little bit limited. It still only happens in pockets. I also know that there are people who say that they do plain language work, when really what they do is substantively edit, or even just stylistically edit. They’ll take the big fancy words with, you know, French etymologies and change them all into English-based words, which you can pretty much do with Microsoft Word. And they’re happy to just do that call it plain language.
I think anything is like that. Any maturing movement is like that. So all that stuff is happening. At least people are… at least even with the bad aspects of it, it’s a little like the guy who says, “Give me any publicity, just give me some publicity. I don’t care whether it’s good or bad.” I’d say it’s almost the same for plain language. Whether you have good plain language or bad plain language… Good plain language is better—it’s a lot better—but at least with people talking about plain language and aware of the idea of plain language and things written in a way that you can understand, I think there’s real benefit to the whole movement. And I think eventually we’ll get to a point where people will understand that no, that’s not actually plain. It needs to be quite different. And I think that’ll be a good place for people to be.
Whether people will invest in it, I don’t know. But some do. Some do. I actually turned down a communications contract with an organization because I knew that the work that they wanted wasn’t plain language work. I knew that going into it, but they were going to offer me whatever I wanted for an hourly rate and I got very excited about that. I’ll admit this. But when I started thinking about it, I thought, “This could become the kind of thing that would suck up all the space that I want to give to plain language.” So I turned it down, crossed my fingers, and hoped for the best. And two days later, I got a phone call from someone saying, “We need a website that’s been written for, you know, legal and medical people, translated so that the general public can understand it. It’s a whole website. Can you do it?” And it was just like, yes. Actually, I’ve left the space to do that. Thank goodness.
Because I wouldn’t have been able… I would have been able to take both projects on, but one of them would have driven me absolutely mad while I struggled with the other. And this way, the other project, that website, that was a challenge, a huge challenge. It was a wonderful challenge, and it was really good work. I’m really, really glad I did it. I’m going to be proud of it when it’s done. But I’m really grateful I didn’t have to deal with this other client at the same time because it would have been impossible.
And I have made a decision. I should knock on wood as I say this, but we don’t have any. But I’ve made a decision now that all my practice is going to be plain language. So I will aim for projects where I can actually do more testing, and I will test all of my documents, whether they’re websites or not.
But, you know, on one level or another. If the project doesn’t allow for it, I’ll find a way to do lean testing or something. But that’s what my process is. That’s what my business is. It is plain language and I’m just not going to be doing “editing.”
IC: Right.
NWC: So.
IC: Wonderful.
NWC: Yeah. We’ll see how that goes.
IC: I’m going to ask you about the debate over terminology. Because you use “plain language” a lot. Yes. But of course there’s pockets of people who think that’s limiting because what we’re doing is we are creating clear communication.
NWC: Right.
IC: So they want to push for a change in terminology that we’re not just doing plain language. If we just keep saying “plain language,” you have to keep explaining that, no, it’s not just language, it’s also design and it’s also structure and also audience analysis and stuff. How do you feel about the term “plain language”? Do you think we need to move away from it? What do you think?
NWC: I think if we can come up with something new and agree on it, that would be great.
IC: [Laughs]
NWC: The only reason I continue to use “plain language” and then explain that it’s also the way things look and you also have to talk to people is because that’s what I’m comfortable with. I’ve used it for 30-some years now. And to me, its meaning has grown and so when I talk to people, I’m comfortable using that old word and continuing the meaning. It has changed.
You know, and even when I think about your four levels of accessibility, even that, I thought to myself, yes, in the back of my mind, I’ve known that that stuff was there. I haven’t really thought about it as my responsibility, but of course when you’re sitting in a room with a graphic designer and a web person, if the web person doesn’t mention usability, that’s something you know about and should probably mention.
So I think there are probably a lot of overlapping responsibilities. I don’t know anything about web design, and I don’t know much about graphic design. I can take something that looks really awful and break it up into paragraphs and change the font.
And now when I’m posting on social media, I use capital letters in hashtags just to make them more readable to other people. But that’s all I know about right now. So for me, it’s still plain language language, mostly.
IC: But you love the idea of being part of a bigger team that’s all dedicated to creating a clearer communication. It’s just different people bringing different expertise.
NWC: Yes. So for example, I recently worked on an annual report. It wasn’t a plain language project. It was an editing project, and it was a pro bono project. It was for [an organization offering] housing and employment support for young people who have had to leave home early. So I did the editing, and then they hired a young graphic… Well. They didn’t hire. They got a young graphic designer to do the design work pro bono.
So I went through… and it’s wonderful that they were able to get that kind of support and they have really good connections in the communities. So we didn’t have a chance to have an initial meeting this year. We usually do, but we didn’t this year. They brought on this new young graphic designer. So I edited the articles, submitted them. The document comes back and their four key articles on pages that are full bleeds of colour. Coral, a lavendery magenta colour, an orangey colour, and then… the other colour must be a green or a blue. I can’t remember. I know it’s not yellow, but it’s all those sorts of tropical colours. It looks very cool, very nice, but the text is in white and it’s small. So I said, “This looks so beautiful in a headline, but it makes the text really hard to read.”
They did not make any changes to it, but what can you do? And actually if you would edit their name out, I’d be grateful. But that’s a marketing piece, and so they’re not that concerned about the plain language aspects.
And to be honest, what I said to them was, “You want people to read this. You need to make it as easy to read as possible. If you just want it to be a lovely marketing piece for donors and sponsors, it accomplishes that goal. But if you want people to read it and get the value out of this, probably your four primary articles should not be laid out this way.”
Anyway, so that was one of those instances where I thought to myself, “I really wish I had been in the room initially and could say, ‘These are the things that I think are important and true.’” So, next year.
IC: [Laughs] Yeah, but you’re right about the function of the document. And I mean, I guess it’s true that a lot of the time people get things in the mail and they never actually read them, but they might trigger some sort of awareness that, oh, it’s a donation campaign and maybe I should contribute, but they’re not going to sit there and leaf through whatever publication they have.
NWC: …a 32-page report, yeah. Yeah, and they’ve gone to a lot of trouble. I mean, this designer went to a lot of trouble to make this document as appealing as she could, except for these articles. So, anyway.
IC: Yeah, so I just wanted to go back to a couple of things that you said that I thought were really interesting. One was when you were talking about Gwen Davies doing the user testing and how it helped the relationship with the community, because the user testing itself was a way to engage with the community.
NWC: Yes—I think that’s really important. When you have a really definable user group, why not communicate with them directly and in person, especially when there are times when the relationship is going to be contentious. There will be disagreements about how much money should be paid from one party to the other. There will be disagreements about whether things arrived on time. There will be disagreements about all kinds of things. So, if you can bring them in and actually have a human experience with them and demonstrate that their opinions are important to you and what matters to them matters to you, I think that’s just useful. That’s really good basic communications practice that you can’t always do. But when you have an opportunity—and user testing is an opportunity—I think it’s just beneficial to take it.
IC: And then another interesting thing was when you were talking about the public health nurses being the ones to feed back to communications that something isn’t working. And you sort of said that it was mostly the public health nurses that were doing that. But I was wondering if… Because when somebody can’t use a document, sometimes you just never hear about it, right? So I thought it was really interesting that there was this feedback—that there was communication from the people on the front lines that something is or isn’t working. And I’m wondering, just thinking out loud here, how to make that a more formal process with other departments or other public servants who are working on the front lines directly with people. To say that, hey, we are receptive to feedback about whether a form works, whether, you know, a pamphlet is meaningful if you’re spending hours and hours explaining something, if you’re on the phone a bunch trying to walk people through a form. And yeah, so it makes me wonder if there isn’t something that we can do to try to make that more formal and more of an everyday practice.
NWC: Yeah, and I have tried a few times to do that. We did something for, oh, I guess it must have been the Registry of Motor Vehicles at the time. I mean, I’m digging way back into my memory here, Iva. But we did a pamphlet for something that’s associated with what is now Service Nova Scotia. And they had front-desk staff, and I thought it was a great opportunity to just write down some—it was so long ago we didn’t have computer forms for things—but just to write down comments or even just to have a couple of questions that staff, the counter staff, would ask people and say, you know, “Did they ask about this? Did they ask about this? Did they ask about this?” and just even just put a mark down saying one, two, yeah, ten people today asked about this. They don’t understand it or something.
The opportunity is there. It’s tricky to get buy-in, because even if you get buy-in from the manager, the manager has to, you know, depending on how big the office is, the manager then has to get somebody else to actually do that. And of course I was always thinking, well, then you would have really good records, but of course you don’t—you have spotty records.
IC: [Laughs]
NWC: But when you think about lean testing, I’d rather have spotty records than no records at all. You know, I’d rather be able to say, “OK, somebody actually recorded seven times last week that this happened. I’m going to take a wild guess and say it happened twenty.”
IC: Right.
NWC: And if you saw 10,000 people last week, maybe everything’s okay. If you only saw 30 people, you might have a problem. It could be really simple, and it’s just getting caught up in the process. And even when you look online for information on good writing, you listen to people who teach writing, people who pay attention to writing, even in academic settings, there’s just so little attention given to good writing. And it just boggles my mind because I’ve focused on it for so many years, I actually have trouble seeing the other side.
But my husband does a lot of writing, and he’s a judge in Nova Scotia. And so he writes decisions pretty regularly. And the number of people who say to us, “Oh, I read your husband’s decision on this” or, or will say to him, “Oh, I read your decision on that.” And they can actually say something about the decision. I know his decisions are written in really plain language—not because of my influence only.
IC: [Laughs]
NWC: That was not his natural tendency when he was a young lawyer, but, you know, over years and years he paid attention to improving his writing. Probably because his earliest clients were family law clients. There’s just no point in writing to somebody in that language when they have that much pain sitting on their left shoulder while they’re trying to read the information you give them. It’s like writing for sick people. Just… they just won’t get it.
So he really did kind of take that on board, and it’s in his writing. And he gets so much feedback on his decisions because people read them. If you write something, people will go and read it. To me, that speaks to how much people appreciate plain language.
Still almost no attention is paid to it. And I was reading something yesterday. This woman was responding to a prof about how to teach better composition to students in universities. And she was saying, you know, here are some of the problems that you probably run into in your classroom that you haven’t really noticed. One, the kids are on their phones while you’re teaching them. They’re getting comments from home or they’re just looking at Instagram or whatever. And she just talked about all the different things that grab people’s attention now. And in a way, I’m a little worried because I feel as though it’s just going to drop in priority and drop and drop and drop.
But I don’t know. I can’t worry about that. I have to stay focused on the fact that people will still call me and say, you know, “We know this isn’t meeting a need. In our guts, we know this isn’t meeting a need and we’re going to make it better.” And when I think about the topics that I work on, which is mostly community legal information, I feel pretty hopeful. I feel like if we can continue to make that information better for people, that will make people’s lives better in a lot of ways. I would really love to see better cell phone contracts.
But even talking to Marina, I can’t pronounce her last name, but she teaches in the law school at the University of Alberta. And she presented in Montreal on cell phone contracts. I don’t know if you heard her presentation. But we’ve been talking back and forth. My interest is in better written cell phone contracts. Her interest is in cell phone contracts that don’t contain some of the clauses that they contain and giving you the opportunity to opt out. And actually what we’ve been talking about a lot, or mostly, has been Wi-Fi. You know, those Wi-Fi agreements or other website agreements that you click and waive your rights to. And heaven knows what people are waiving their rights to when they’re signing those things off.
So plain language really will not solve that problem. You know, that’s a bigger societal problem. Plain language can help make it more obvious that that gap is there, but it won’t solve it by itself. So that’s an even bigger community to become involved with. It’s great to have really plain laws about your rights as a tenant. But if your rights as a tenant are really not that strong, like, that’s not the area of focus. It has to be over there. So I appreciate that.
IC: Yeah. I guess in my research, I encounter the same thing as well, where we’re trying to communicate rights to involuntary patients. But the fact is that in BC, those rights are quite weak compared with the rest of Canada. There are people working on actual law reform and then there are people like me who just want people to know about the information. And, yeah, one of the things that I was writing about in my dissertation was the concept of information control. So this comes from the social cognition literature that says that when people have the information they want, they feel more in control.
NWC: Right.
IC: And so that was one of the interventions that I was trying to get at, was really just, you know, there isn’t much you can do, but here is what you need to know about your current situation. So that they don’t have as much anxiety about being hospitalized against their will. You know, that they understand where the boundaries are to the law. And even if they don’t go ahead and exercise their rights, they understand that they have rights. And that… just knowing that they have rights is huge in terms of alleviating some of that uncertainty.
NWC: Yeah. Well, and the project that I did on the website was on medical assistance in dying. And so I had not given it a lot of thought. I’m only 59, so I hadn’t really given it a lot of thought. But when I started looking at the information she had on the website, I realized people have a lot of rights, and they have a lot of control at the end of their lives. And nobody’s even thinking about it until it’s too late.
IC: Right.
NWC: So it’s important. And there is control that you don’t have. There comes a point in which you have no control anymore. You have no control. Your family has no control. There are things that just cannot be managed well in those situations.
And if you waive your rights or if you don’t take control of your rights while you still have capacity to do so, you’re in a really tight spot, really. So knowing about that, being aware of what the limits are and what the options are, I think just goes such a long way. So having done that website, I was then asked to work on text for an app that allows people to write up an advance directive. It guides them through the decision-making process.
And there were a couple of times when I went back and actually looked at the legislation that gives people this authority and thought to myself, like, I understand why legislation needs to be written. But when people have basic rights that have to do with their ordinary health and comfort, people who are in situations that millions of Canadians will be in, why does the government think this is the best way to tell them about that?
Anyway, there are lots of people working on that and so that’s very good. And there’s lots of good writing out there on what your rights are. How well that’s communicated to people, I don’t know. I’m hoping that we can just do something quite different. So anyway, wish me luck.
IC: [Laughs] Good luck!
NWC: Thank you.
IC: And then one thing that… Sorry, go ahead.
NWC: I was just going to say also, when your work is ready to be published, I would love to see it because when I worked for the government, I worked with the Department of Justice. And so I actually worked on things not really closely associated with involuntary incarceration, but, you know, you worked on the communication plans when people were being appointed to those boards. So I’ve seen it from the other side. I know how hard it is to get psychiatrists to say, “Oh sure, I’ll sit on your involuntary review board for free or for a very low amount of money” and go through this process that’s difficult—and difficult for everybody—and really difficult for patients who find themselves in these really awful situations where they’ve been in conflict with the law for no real reason that they had control over. So I’ve seen it from the other side, and I would really love to see it from the side from which you’ve seen it. I think that will be really instructive for me and hopefully for the Government of Nova Scotia. [Laughs]
IC: Yeah.
And then one thing that you mentioned, just sort of offhand, but kind of made me curious—this doesn’t really have to do with our interview topic—but you said something about the Red Tape Reduction Agency. Can you tell me more about that? What was that about?
NWC: The Nova Scotia government, I can’t remember how many years ago, but I think in the mid- to late 1990s, established this organization called the Red Tape Reduction Agency, and what they were is they’re an organization that sits outside the Department of Business. And the idea was, small businesses in Nova Scotia have a huge amount of red tape to overcome—and they do. And so this agency is dedicated to reducing all of that. So of course one of the things they were interested in was the way government communicates with small business, which is in governmentese.
And so they mostly focus on new regulations that come in and just continue to create new barriers for small businesses, but plain language is something that they have been interested in, in the past. And so hopefully they will remain interested in. I have found my dealings with government actually to be, with that Department of Business, to be really good. I had to register my business. It was so easy. I actually had to follow up with them and make sure I had it done.
IC: [Laughs]
NWC: Do you know what I mean? It was like when you take a new computer out of the box and it says, “OK, plug it in. OK, you’re good to go,” and you think to yourself “Wait…”
IC: “…really?” [Laughs]
NWC: It’s a computer—there must be more! So I know that they’re making good inroads in some areas, but their focus on plain language is not unwavering. But yeah, they exist and they continue to work on… When I was at the Department of Justice, we were… oh, we passed the Accessibility Act. And so one of the things we wanted was to make business more accessible. Well the Red Tape Reduction people were right there to say, “A huge proportion of businesses in Halifax—small businesses—are restaurants. They are going to need ramps. They’re in 200-year-old buildings. We have to find a way to make this work for them.” And they really advocated for their clients, and they were in there. It was great. And they weren’t adversarial. It was, “We need to work together to make this happen.”
IC: Wow.
NWC: So that was really good.
IC: Amazing!
NWC: It was amazing. It was amazing.
IC: You don’t really often hear about that kind of collaboration—or that collaborative spirit—anyway. Yeah.
NWC: Well, I will say, we came out with a bill initially and took it to… We didn’t come out with the first bill. I think the Department of Community Services came out with the first bill because they had an organization called the Disabled Persons Commission, which just reflects a whole lot of things that needed to be changed in the government’s thinking in this area. That legislation went to the floor of the house—and I can talk about this. That legislation went to the floor of the house, and a group of a very loosely affiliated group of people who either had disabilities or were associated with people with disabilities showed up and were sitting in the legislative chamber and were listening to the debate.
In Nova Scotia we have a legislative review process called the Law Amendments Committee. It’s after legislation hits second reading and there’s been some public debate on it. They go into another room in the building, and they have a public committee meeting. So it is the Law Amendments Committee, which is a committee of the House of Assembly, but it’s a public meeting, so people can show up. They held the meeting. These meetings are always scheduled at the convenience of the house. Everybody who’s said in advance they were interested in the legislation gets an email that says the meeting is tomorrow at 9 am.
IC: [Laughs]
NWC: Which as a communicator, a government communicator, I’ve never been comfortable with. But there’s really nothing like an outside group of advocates to change things. These people said that’s too soon. Nobody who needs an Access-A-Bus can get to the meeting. Second, you need to have accommodation for people who can’t hear, so you need to have an interpreter. Third, you need to have closed captioning in the room, and you need to put it live on the internet, and you need captioning on your live feed.
The committee said… they went away, and the government said we’re doing all of those things; you’re meeting again in the winter. And that was it. The whole process was shut down. A huge number of changes were made. A few senior public servants contacted the people who were in that group and who were most vocal and said, “We cannot do this alone. The people who made these mistakes can’t solve them. Please come in and work with us.” They had a process where they met with this group of people, I don’t know, four or five times and said, “First of all, the legislation—let’s deal with that.” Then once we’ve got something that we can take back to the legislative people, then let’s talk about the process for bringing this forward to Law Amendments again. And they did.
We ended up with legislation people were really happy with. It was similar to the form letters. We engaged with the people who were affected and built a relationship, and it worked. And we have really good accessibility legislation. The business community who were very, very concerned about having to make changes—having changes imposed upon them—they got to hear. They also got to provide some input, and people with disabilities got to hear from them. It was one of the smartest things I’ve seen in government in 30 years.
IC: [Laughs]
NWC: It was just a really smart thing to do, and it worked really well. I was just really proud to be part of it. And with that legislation we actually created a little video for people. Or that may have been another piece of legislation we worked on at the same time. Those last few weeks were really busy.
We also passed legislation called… we had to revert… our Incompetent Persons Act was struck down, and we had to replace it with new legislation on representative decision making for people who couldn’t make decisions for themselves. And so that legislation went through at the same time. That’s the legislation we created the video for. Because of course, again, the people who were most affected were people who had cognitive or learning disabilities. And their proponents said, you know, we need to do some things about that. And we did.
IC: What a feel-good story!
NWC: It’s wonderful. I’m still glowing when I think about it.
IC: So that pretty much covers what I wanted to ask you. Was there anything you wanted to add? Or anything else you wanted to say?
NWC: No, I don’t think there’s anything else I want to add. I feel pretty positive about where plain language is going. I’m really curious about what’s going to happen with the international standards. I am in favour of it. I want to see how it unfolds, given that it’s not going to be as straightforward as maybe we initially thought it would be. And I feel like I’d like to be a part of that, although I don’t know how. I’ll have to think about that. I may have to let go of my love of cell phone contract revision. [Laughs] So I’m not sure what will happen there. But yeah, I feel pretty positive about it. I feel like it’s going to grow as a field of study and as a field of work.
I’d really like to see it grow as a field of academic study. I just feel like there’s not enough. And I wonder if it’s because it really is going to be an interdisciplinary study. There just isn’t something where it sits…It doesn’t seem to me that there is. And it’s easier to understand and easier to explain where you’re going when you can say to people, “Look, there’s a huge amount of research in this field. And it all tells us the same thing.” So we have a little bit more, but there’s still room for so much more. Especially when you start to think about creating documents for people with cognitive disabilities and websites. I think there’s more work in how websites look.
But there’s so much stuff that we don’t know. So much stuff I don’t know, and maybe we don’t, know about what is the difference between writing for people for whom English is a subsequent language and people who never learned to read because they had learning disability or they had a crappy grade 3 teacher or the many reasons people get into their first year of university and can’t create a sentence. For some of them, that’s just a writing challenge. But for a lot of them, there’s a reading challenge there as well. So how do you make that happen?
That’s it.
IC: Thank you.
NWC: You’re welcome. Thanks for asking me.
IC: Of course. I’m really excited to have all of these perspectives. It’s been a really rich experience.
NWC: I’ll bet.
IC: I just feel bad about how slowly I’m getting to actually doing the transcriptions and stuff. But hopefully once I get a few more in, I’ll be able to get them done.
NWC: I don’t know, it’s a movement that’s been 40 years in the making. I think any progress that’s made on that side will be worthwhile.
IC: All right. I’m going to stop the recording there.