Author: Iva Cheung

The Collaborative Editor by Christine Steele and Lourdes Venard

Two-frame cartoon. Frame 1: Curly-haired editor is flipping through a stack of paper and says to Bespectacled editor, sitting at her desk, “You wrote a whole manuscript?” Frame 2: Bespectacled editor says, “I was *method editing*—putting myself in my authors’ shoes so that I can better empathize with and support them.”

In 2025, fellow editors Christine Steele and Lourdes Venard asked me if I’d be interested in contributing a few cartoons to their upcoming book. I got to read an early draft of what became The Collaborative Editor and appreciated their approach to cultivating mutually respectful professional relationships between editors and authors through clear and tactful communication. They recently published a blog post detailing their journey from editors to published authors.

This cartoon is one of three that will appear in their book, which is now available for preorder. In lieu of accepting a fee for this commissioned work, I asked for a donation to the Qajuqturvik Community Food Centre, which I’m grateful to the authors for making.

The Collaborative Editor: How to Build Trust with Writers Through Queries and Other Communications will be published by the University of Chicago Press in spring 2027. Thanks, Christine and Lourdes, for inviting me to be a part of it!

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The plain language movement in Canada, 1980–1995: Interview with Christine Mowat

This is a near-verbatim transcript of a phone interview I did with Christine Mowat on September 6, 2019. She joined the call from her home in Edmonton, AB, and I was in Metro Vancouver. This interview is part of my project to compile an oral history of the plain language movement in Canada between 1980 and 1995.

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IC: All right, so thank you once again, Christine, for agreeing to talk to me. I wanted to find out more about the plain language movement in Canada, because I just figured there isn’t all that much information out there.

As I mentioned, Karen Schriver’s done quite a bit of work on the American side, and I know that circumstances in Canada were a bit different, and I’m just curious to know from people who were in the thick of it, how they experienced it.

CM: And did you, by any chance… have you read my books?

IC: I have read one of them, yes. The Plain Language Handbook…

CM: …for Legal Writers?

IC: Yes, yes, that one.

CM: Was it the first edition, or the second?

IC: I don’t remember, I don’t have it with me.

CM: The second edition has two volumes.

IC: OK.

CM: And it came out in 2015.

IC: No, it must have been the earlier edition.

CM: OK.

IC: Yeah. So, I guess I’ll get started with the first question. When did you become involved with the plain language movement, and what inspired you to join?

CM: Well, I think I really started learning about it when I opened my business, Wordsmith Associates Communications Consultants. And I just learned about it, you know, from online, and from learning that people in the United States had been paying attention to it. And when I started Wordsmith, I started conducting writing workshops—just writing. And my range of clients are incredibly diverse [laughs] over the years. Because in the end, I had clients for… I ran the business for 30 years. It is continuing now because one of my instructors bought the business from me. And so next year it will be 40 years old, the business.

But why did I… why was I attracted to the plain language field? Um, it had all to do with enjoying so many things related to it. For example, incorporating plain language’s ethical principles. Continue reading “The plain language movement in Canada, 1980–1995: Interview with Christine Mowat”

The plain language movement in Canada, 1980–1995: Interview with Jan Catano and Gwen Davies

This 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.

***

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.

Cover of the booklet "5 keys to building a clear & usable website" by Gwen Davies. The cover is orange with silhouettes of skeleton keys in different shades of orange.

Copyright page of *5 keys to building a clear & usable website." The text reads "5 keys to building a clear & usable website © copyright Gwen Davies, 2015 Design: Kathy Kaulbach, Touchstone Design House Bright Crow Publishing Halifax, Nova Scotia ISBN: 9-781522 916475" There is a black silhouette of a crow next to the publisher name.Contents Start to Build a Working Relationship with Plain Language … 1 First key: Plan Your Site to Make it Work … 9 Second key: Write Your Site to Serve Your Visitors … 19 Bonus: Section on emails … 37 Third key: Organize Your Site to Flow … 41 Fourth key: Design Your Site to Make Your Message Clear … 57 Fifth key: Test Your Site to Make Sure It Works … 71 End Note … 79 Convoluted Terminology … 80 Resources … 82

 

 

 

 

 

 

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. Continue reading “The plain language movement in Canada, 1980–1995: Interview with Jan Catano and Gwen Davies”

The plain language movement in Canada, 1980–1995: Interview with Nicole Watkins Campbell

This 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.

***

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. Continue reading “The plain language movement in Canada, 1980–1995: Interview with Nicole Watkins Campbell”

The plain language movement in Canada, 1980–1995: Interview with Michelle Black

This is a near-verbatim transcript of an in-person interview I did with Michelle Black in Halifax, NS, on June 9, 2019, where we were both attending the Editors Canada annual conference. This interview is part of my project to compile an oral history of the plain language movement in Canada between 1980 and 1995. Although the transcript reflects her views at the time, those views might have evolved since the interview took place.

***

IC: All right, thank you so much, Michelle, for taking the time to sit down with me. It’s so exciting to see you here and to be able to chat with you.

MB: Likewise.

IC: I’m just going to read the questions off my phone, if that’s OK.

MB: Absolutely. No worries!

IC: All right. So yeah, the reason I’m doing this study is that I really found that… I was inspired by Karen Schriver, who was doing this full-fledged plain language history in the United States. And I was trying to find something equivalent in Canada and really didn’t find anything. And so there’s just this kind of gap in documenting what actually happened during this period that I’m studying—1980 to about 1995. Pretty flexible on that window. But really wanted to know about the plain language movement in Canada and the differences in context between Canada and the United States and the UK, and other places. So, yeah, just wanted to get your perspective on it.

MB: Sure.

IC: So when did you become involved with the plain language movement, and what inspired you to join?

MB: This is a great story, because I’ve told it so many times. In 1994, I had graduated with a French and Spanish language degree and a minor in cinema studies. And I was very interested in how information communicates and how different languages communicate, and I was horrible at math and science. So when I finished my undergrad, I started doing interpreting in Spanish and thought that might be a good way to go. Translation was not going to be my thing. It was too much like math—too boring and dry and… methodical. That’s the word.

So anyway, I started realizing that there was… “Oh, I could teach literacy.” Because if I’m not from the culture of somebody I’m interpreting for, Spanish or French, which in Toronto is often African people, people from all over the world, I’m not going to be able to serve them. So then I started teaching literacy as a volunteer and didn’t really know what I was going to do at that point. And then the first week, I took a literacy workers’ training course with Metro Toronto Movement for Literacy. And it was, like, I think a three-month course, once a week. And their first week was all about language and who does it belong to. And one of the papers that they came out with was from… I think it’s called Vancouver Literacy Group, and it was an older paper. Continue reading “The plain language movement in Canada, 1980–1995: Interview with Michelle Black”