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Stefan Dollinger on the changing expectations of the Oxford English Dictionary

Until December 24, 2013, Rare Books and Special Collections at the UBC Library is running an exhibition, The Road to the Oxford English Dictionary, that traces the history of English lexicography and the work that eventually led to the OED. To kick off this exhibition, Stefan Dollinger, assistant professor in the English department at UBC and editor-in-chief of The Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, gave a free public lecture titled “Oxford English Dictionary, the Grimm Brothers, and Miley Cyrus: On the Changing Expectations of the OED—Past, Present, and (Possible) Futures.”

The OED, said Dollinger, bills itself as “the definitive record of the English language.” So what happens when you try to look up a recently coined word like “twerk”? The Oxford English Dictionary itself returns

No dictionary entries found for ‘twerk’.

but oxforddictionaries.com, the contemporary dictionary, gives this definition:

twerk
Pronunciation: /twəːk/
verb
[no object] informal

dance to popular music in a sexually provocative manner involving thrusting hip movements and a low, squatting stance:

just wait till they catch their daughters twerking to this song

twerk it girl, work it girl

Will words like “twerk” and “bootylicious” eventually make their way into the OED? We don’t usually expect these kinds of neologisms to become accepted by the dictionary so quickly, but earlier this year, the OED quietly added the social media sense of the word “tweet,” breaking its rule that a word has to be current for ten years before it’s considered for inclusion—a move that possibly signals a change in our expectations of the dictionary.

Dollinger took a step back to the roots of the OED. As much as Oxford University Press would like to claim that the dictionary was a pioneering publication, a lot of the groundwork for the kind of lexicography used to put it together had been laid by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm a few years earlier when they published the first volume of their German language dictionary (Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm). Nor is the OED‘s the world’s largest monolingual dictionary; that distinction belongs to the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal (Dictionary of the Dutch language), with over 430,000 entries running almost 50,000 pages. Is the OED the most historically important dictionary? Dollinger offered the contrasting example of the Dictionary of American Regional English, a project of the American Dialect Society, which used detailed questionnaires to collect rigorous regional, social, and historical data about words used in American English. Although the number of entries pales in comparison with the OED, the level of detail is unparalleled and probably more important to researchers of the English language.

Still, there’s no denying that the OED has been extremely influential and is still considered an authoritative resource. Dollinger gave us a run-down of the dictionary’s history.

In November 1857, Richard Chenevix Trench, Dean of Westminster Abbey, addressed the Philological Society in London in a talk later published as On Some Deficiencies in Our English Dictionaries. In this publication, which planted the seeds of the OED, Trench outlined seven problems with existing dictionaries:

I. Obsolete words are incompletely registered; some inserted, some not; with no reasonable rule adduced for the omission of these, the insertion of those other.

II. Families or groups of words are often imperfect, some members of a family inserted, while others are omitted.

III. Oftentimes much earlier examples of the employment of words exist than any which our Dictionaries have cited; indicating that they were earlier introduced into the language than these examples would imply; and in case of words now obsolete, much later, frequently marking their currency at a period long after that when we are left to suppose that they passed out of use.

IV. Important meanings and uses of words are passed over; sometimes the later alone given, while the earlier, without which the history of words will be often maimed and incomplete, or even unintelligible, are unnoticed.

V. Comparatively little attention is paid to the distinguishing of synonymous words.

VI. Many passages in our literature are passed by, which might be usefully adduced in illustration of the first introduction, etymology, and meaning of words.

VII. And lastly, our Dictionaries err in redundancy as well as in defect, in the too much as well as the too little; all of them inserting some things, and some of them many things, which have properly no claim to find room in their pages.

Trench’s recommendations included using quotations to show usage, a practice now known as the “OED method” but that should, accordingly to Dollinger, perhaps more accurately be termed the “Grimm method,” seeing as they used the same approach for their Wörterbuch. Trench also wrote

A Dictionary, then, according to that idea of it which seems to me alone capable of being logically maintained, is an inventory of the language… It is no task of the maker of it to select the good words of a language. If he fancies that it is so, and begins to pick and choose, to leave this and to take that, he will at once go astray. The business which he has undertaken is to collect and arrange all the words, whether good or bad, whether they commend themselves to his judgment or otherwise, which, with certain exceptions hereafter to be specified, those writing in the language have employed.

This most progressive thought of Trench’s echoes the Grimms, who, three years earlier, in their 1854 Wörterbuch, had written

“And here the difference between adorned language and vulgar (raw) language comes into effect… Should the dictionary list the indecent words or should they be left out?… The dictionary, if it is supposed to be worth its salt, is not here to hide words, but to show them… one must not try to eradicate such words and expressions.”

Trench, incidentally, never acknowledged any of the Grimms’ innovations, many of which the OED‘s lexicographers (consciously or unconsciously) borrowed.

In 1879, Oxford University Press appointed James A.H. Murray as editor-in-chief of the OED, and he edited more than half of the entries in the first edition. In 1928, the dictionary was published in twelve volumes, at which point it already needed updating. William Craigie and C.T. Onions edited a supplement, published in 1933; the thirteen volumes together are referred to collectively as OED1. Edmund Weiner and John Simpson co-edited the dictionary’s second edition, OED2, which was published in print in 1989 and on CD-ROM in 1992.

Did these editors follow Trench’s suggestion that the OED be a comprehensive inventory of the language? Dollinger noted that colonial bias in Victorian times, and consequently, in the OED, was pervasive, and despite the editors’ best intentions of keeping the dictionary up to date, likely more than 50 percent of the original entries remain unchanged. Dollinger argued that perhaps the tagline “The definitive record of the English language” should more accurately read “The definitive record of the English language (as seen by Oxford [mostly] men largely of the [upper] middle class).” For instance, the dictionary has long been criticized for relying on literary texts for examples of usage. Dollinger offered the example of “sea-dingle,” whose OED entry reads as follows:

sea-dingle n. (now only arch.) an abyss or deep in the sea.

a1240 Sowles Warde in Cott. Hom. 263 His runes ant his domes þe derne beoð ant deopre þen eni sea dingle [= abyss of the sea: cf. Ps. xxxv. 6 Vulg. Judicia tua abyssus multa].

c1931 W.H. Auden in M. Roberts New Signatures (1932) 30 Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle.

Yet, as Seth Lerer has noted, W.H. Auden (an Oxford man) “mined the OED for archaic, pungent words.” Does his use of the word really reflect common usage? Not, said Dollinger, if you look at the Urban Dictionary entry for the term:

1. sea-dingle

A sex act involving two people in which salmon roe is used as lubrication facilitating anal penetration by a penis.

Yeah, I was out camping with my wife. I got lucky when we went fishing and then again when we went back to the tent. She was totally down for a sea-dingle.

(This practice of recycling old terms in a “reification of literary writers” brought to my mind this XKCD cartoon on citogenesis.)

Dollinger pointed out a problem with the way the OED describes itself:

the Oxford English Dictionary is an irreplaceable part of English culture. It not only provides an important record of the evolution of our language, but also documents the continuing development of our society.

What is “English culture,” and what is “our”? In other words, who owns English? As early as the late 1960s, linguist David Crystal noted that, in order to be a comprehensive record of English, the OED would have to include World Englishes. Today the number of people who speak English as a second language outnumber native speakers five to one, and they use a kind of global English for trade and other interactions. Who are native speakers to say that their terms—handy for “cell phone” in Euro-English, prepone for “rescheduling to an earlier time” in Indo-English, and batchmate for “cohort member” in Philippine English—aren’t proper English usage?

As far as Dollinger is concerned, the OED is at a crossroads and can go down one of three paths:

Take an Inner Circle focus (i.e., UK, Australia, New Zealand, North America, South Africa).
Retreat to focus on British English only (which would in itself be a challenging task, owing to the variations of English spoken across the country).
Include all World Englishes, in which case the dictionary should treat the Inner, Outer and Expanding circles on an equal footing. If its aim is truly to be the “principal dictionary of record for the English language throughout the lifetime of all current users of the language,” as the preface to the third edition of the OED claims, this path is the only logical choice.

Dollinger closed by encouraging all of us to check out the exhibition at Rare Books and Special Collections.

Karen Schriver—Plain by design: Evidence-based plain language (PLAIN 2013)

We may be good at the how of plain language, but the why can be more elusive. To fill in that missing chunk of the puzzle, information design expert Karen Schriver has scoured the empirical research on writing and design published between 1980 and 2010. She gave the PLAIN 2013 audience an eye-opening overview of her extensive, cross-disciplinary review, debunking some long-held myths in some instances and reaffirming our practices in others.

Audiences, readers, and users

***

Evidence-based plain language helps us understand the reasons behind our principles and practices, allowing us to go beyond intuition in improving our work and developing expertise. We can also offer up this body of research to support our arguments for plain language and convince clients that our work is important and effective. What Schriver would like to see (and what the plain language community clearly needs) is a repository for this invaluable research.

Isabelle Boucher—Plain language is a service to members (PLAIN 2013)

Isabelle Boucher, education officer with the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), made a strong case at her PLAIN 2013 plenary session for using plain language in union documentation and union activities. “Unions aren’t just about collective agreements,” she said. “They’re about social justice.” Plain language allows members to understand their rights and

is inclusive—not all union members have the same education and literacy skills
is democratic—union members who understand what’s going on are more likely to vote
encourages participation—members are more likely to speak up and take on roles within the union if they feel like part of the process
creates safe and healthy workplaces—workers can follow safety procedures only if they understand them.

Boucher outlined the work of CUPE’s literacy working group—which develops programs and gives feedback on literacy tools—since it was created in 2000. In 2001–2002, the literacy program offered clear language training for CUPE staff across Canada.

At its general meetings in 2005 and 2007, CUPE accepted both traditional resolutions

Whereas…
Be it resolved that…

as well as plain language resolutions

CUPE National will…
Because…

It announced that in 2009 it would accept only the plain language version. The literacy program knew it was on the right track when, in 2007, virtually all of the resolutions submitted used the plain wording.

In 2011, CUPE rewrote its constitution in plain language, and in 2013, it began revising its model bylaws.

More information about CUPE’s clear language initiatives can be found here.

Sarah Stacy-Baynes and Anne-Marie Chisnall—User testing: health booklets that work for people (PLAIN 2013)

Sarah Stacy-Baynes is the national information manager at the Cancer Society of New Zealand, and she teamed up with plain language specialist Anne-Marie Chisnall of Write Limited to work on twenty booklets for cancer patients and their families, covering topics from types of cancer and types of treatments to living well with cancer and managing symptoms and side effects. These booklets offer clear, evidence-based information to a general audience, and to ensure that they remain accurate, relevant, and useful, Stacy-Baynes and her team put each of them through a review process once every four to five years. Oncologists, nurses, and other health practitioners are consulted to ensure the content is up to date, and the team actively solicits user feedback. Not only does each booklet contain a feedback form at the back, which asks such questions as “Did you find this booklet helpful?”, “Did you find this booklet easy to understand?”, and “Did you have any questions not answered in the booklet?”, but it also undergoes rigorous user testing before publication or republication.

For these booklets Stacy-Baynes and Chisnall performed think-aloud testing, a method in which test subjects receive a document they’ve never seen before and talk about it as they go through it. Each testing session includes a tester, user, and note taker, and it may be recorded (video or audio). The tester uses a script to work with the participants, and they make sure the users are informed about confidentiality and other ethical issues.

The tester and user go through a warm-up exercise first, on an unrelated item such as a menu. Once testing begins, the tester can reflect or repeat what the user says but can’t directly ask the user any questions. However, the tester can coach the user to make sure he or she has thought about the visuals, for example. A video of a sample testing session can be found here.

To recruit testers, Stacy-Baynes and her team asked for volunteers at the cancer society and through Cancer Connect, a peer support group for cancer patients and their families. As a result, their pool of testers was a representative sample of their target audience. They also made sure to recruit Māori participants: each booklet is bilingual—in English and Te Reo Māori—a particularly important feature because, as Stacy-Baynes noted, of all ethnicities of women, Māori women have the highest incidence of lung cancer. The team found that testing five participants for each booklet gave them plenty of useful feedback.

They discovered through their testing that users

preferred that the cover image not be of a person—they and their families didn’t want to see pictures of sick people when the booklet was out on their coffee table (the booklets now feature photos of plants)
wanted to see pictures of the treatment facilities
wanted to see pictures of Māori
preferred simplified diagrams rather than detailed medical illustrations.

Stacy-Baynes did encounter problems during the project—for example, some clinicians reviewing the material were sometimes determined to include some content regardless of whether the readers wanted it. Keeping team members motivated and interested through the long process of testing and redrafting was also challenging, but the team gained a lot of information from user testing that they wouldn’t otherwise have found.

“Proofread”

Creative Commons License
(Educate clients about different types of editing by pointing them to the Editors’ Association of Canada’s Professional Editorial Standards.)

Greg Moriarty and Justine Cooper—Persuading clients that plain language works (PLAIN 2013)

Those of us who work with plain language have no doubts about its value, but how do we convince clients that creating plain language communications is worth the investment?

We tend to default to telling potential clients about the consequences of implementing plain language—for example, that they’ll get fewer calls from confused customers or that they’ll increase compliance. These types of arguments can be quite persuasive, but Greg Moriarty and Justine Cooper from the Plain English Foundation in Australia reminded us about other types of proof that we can add to our arsenal.

Example arguments

When putting together proposals, use case studies—preferably examples from comparable organizations. (Joe Kimble’s Writing for Dollars, Writing to Please is a good source of case studies.) Seeing concrete numbers of money and time saved can help potential clients recognize the value of plain language.

Authority arguments

Government commitments to clear communication, such as the Plain Writing Act in the U.S. or Health Canada’s Plain Language Labelling Initiative, offer authoritative reasons to adopt plain language and are hard for clients to argue with. When writing proposals, establish your own authority, supporting your arguments with research or precedent. (Karen Schriver has compiled an impressive body of research related to various facets of information design.) Finally, don’t underestimate an appeal to principle: that plain language is ethical and leads to more transparency and accountability can be a strong motivator for clients to sign on.

***

Moriarty and Cooper recommend using all three types of arguments whenever you pitch plain language to a prospective client. Your primary arguments should be based on consequences: outlining the benefits of plain language, showing cause and effect and appealing to the power of possibility, is one of the most powerful ways to make your case. Support these with examples, followed by authority arguments. Consider the context and tailor your arguments to the client; the more specific you can be, the better.

Peter Levesque—What is the role of plain language in knowledge mobilization? (PLAIN 2013)

How do we measure the value of research?

Productivity in academia is still largely measured using the “publish or perish” model: the longer your list of publications, the more quickly you rise through the ranks in the ivory towers.

But what happens to the research after it’s out there? In an ideal world, industry, government, and community groups put it to use, and other researchers build on it to make more discoveries. “If we put billions of dollars into research, shouldn’t we get billions of dollars’ worth of value?” asked Peter Levesque, director of the Institute for Knowledge Mobilization. “We couldn’t answer that question,” he told us, “because we didn’t know what we were getting.”

Part of the disconnect comes from the data explosion of the information age. For example, in 1945, fewer than five hundred articles were published in geology—it was possible for a geologist to know everything in his or her field. Today, thousands of geology articles are published each year, and there’s no way a researcher can keep on top of all of the research. Levesque gave another example: a family doctor would have to read seven research articles a day, every day of the year, to keep up with the latest discoveries. Physicians don’t know the latest research simply because they can’t.

Disseminating research via the traditional passive push of journals and conferences isn’t effectively getting the knowledge into the hands of people who can use it. The growing complexity and interdisciplinarity of research is also demanding a shift in thinking. This recognition—that knowing isn’t the same thing as doing—is one of the foundations of knowledge mobilization, which advocates not only a push of knowledge but an active pull and exchange, creating linkages between communities and encouraging joint production. Knowledge mobilization, admits Levesque, is a term wrapped up in jargon: there are over ninety terms used to describe essentially the same concept, including knowledge translation and knowledge transfer, but they all boil down to “making what we know ready to be put into service and action to create new value and benefits.” Knowledge mobilization is still a system under construction, said Levesque, but it is a promise of improvement. By getting the latest evidence into the hands of those who develop our policies, programs, and procedures, we can improve—and in some cases save—lives.

So where does plain language come in? Well, if the evidence we’re using is incomprehensible, it’s effectively useless. Solutions in complex systems require input from several sources of knowledge, and specialized language creates barriers to interdisciplinary communication. Because academics aren’t used to communicating in plain language, they need plain language practitioners to translate the knowledge for them or to consult them on knowledge mobilization projects.

A practical example of knowledge mobilization in action is ResearchImpact, where universities from across Canada have posted over four hundred plain language summaries of research. Another example is the Cochrane Collaboration, the world’s largest organization that makes current medical research, including systematic reviews and meta-analyses, available to all government, industry, community, and academic stakeholders. The Knowledge Transfer and Exchange Community of Practice aims to connect the practitioners of knowledge transfer from across the country.

Levesque advocates continuing the conversation between the plain language and knowledge mobilization communities to strengthen the links between the groups. One opportunity to do so is the Canadian Knowledge Mobilization Forum, set for June 9, 2014, in Saskatoon.

Greg Adams and Matthew Kaul—When plain language isn’t enough: Plain language and Global English at a global healthcare company (PLAIN 2013)

As editors at Cook Medical, an international medical device company, Greg Adams and Matthew Kaul have worked on content destined for translation into over twenty languages. (Kaul recently left to launch his own writing and editing business.) To create content that can be easily translated, they apply principles of Global English, an evidence-based system of writing techniques based on linguistic research. Global English arose out of the need to translate software documentation into many languages and was designed to facilitate both human and machine translation.

Global English can support plain language efforts because it ensures clarity. A document deemed “plain” may have short sentences and use familiar words, but looking at it through the eyes of a translator can expose imprecise statements. Global English proponent John Kohl says, “the quality of the source text, not the skill or competence of the translator, is typically the biggest factor that affects translation quality,” and because translation quality is a reflection of the quality of your product or service in a lot of cultures, we should be putting more emphasis on creating high-quality source texts. Adams and Kohl showed how the following Global English principles can help:

Make sure your sentences are semantically complete

Plain language advocates suggest using short sentences, but shortness should not be an end in itself. Don’t omit syntactic cues such as articles. For example,

Block open port on catheter fitting.

might mean

Block [the] open port on [the] catheter fitting.

Block open [the port] on [a] catheter fitting.

These two interpretations have opposite meanings.

Avoid ambiguous punctuation

For example, in this sentence:

Advance the guide catheter/sheath.

should the user advance the catheter and sheath simultaneously? Should the user advance either the catheter or the sheath? Are the catheter and sheath the same thing?

Dashes can also lead to ambiguity: are parenthetical constructions set off by dashes definitions, interjections, or clarifications?

Avoid -ing words

Words that end in -ing can function as many different parts of speech and can therefore lead to ambiguity. The example that Adams and Kaul gave the following example:

Get comfortable hearing protectors and get comfortable using them.

“Hearing” is an adjective, whereas “using” is a verb.

(This sentence is particularly insidious because it sets up a false parallelism: “get comfortable” is used in two different ways.)

Be consistent with your terminology

Avoid using the same word in multiple parts of speech. Otherwise, as we saw with the “get comfortable” example above, you might confuse the translator or reader. Also, use unambiguous words like “when” instead of “once” and “although” instead of “while.”

Avoid broad-reference and ambiguous pronouns

Some languages don’t have a pronoun that can stand for an entire phrase in the way some English writers use “which” and “that.” In this example

Our new monitor has virtually no background noise. That should substantially reduce the number of false positives.

“that” refers to the absence of noise, an antecedent that isn’t explicitly mentioned in the previous sentence. The translator would have to infer what the pronoun refers to and try to find a way to express the vague concept in the target language.

Make sure any pronouns you use have clear antecedents. Be wary of the following words when used as pronouns, because they can often be imprecise:

all
another
any
each
either
few
following
former
latter
many
neither
none
one
other
the rest
same
several
some
such
that
them
these
those

***

To learn more about Global English, visit Adams and Kaul’s blog, Global English for Everyone. They also suggest these resources:

Microsoft Style Guide, Fourth Edition.
John Kohl, The Global English Style Guide: Writing Clear, Translatable Documentation for a Global Market.
Sun Technical Publications, Read Me First! A Style Guide for the Computer Industry.

Tammy Vigue—The power of “no”: How one simple word can transform your work and your life (PLAIN 2013)

“Success has less to do with what we can get ourselves to do and more to do with keeping ourselves from doing what we shouldn’t.”
—Kenneth Cole

Tammy Vigue is a business and life coach who, until seven years ago, “was completely incapable of saying no.” As an executive in the financial industry, she found herself so overwhelmed that she eventually had to see a doctor, complaining that she had trouble concentrating and couldn’t sleep.

“You need to take a stress leave,” the doctor said.

“I can’t,” she responded. “I’m too busy.”

This situation is one that a lot of us can relate to, and several factors compel us to say yes to opportunities even though they might not be in our best interest. We worry that if we say no that we’ll create conflict, that the job won’t be done as well or at all without us, or that we won’t get any more offers. We have superhero syndrome, and we believe we can take it all on, but “when we can’t say no,” said Vigue, “our bodies will do it for us.” She pointed to Gabor Maté’s international bestseller When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress, which shows the links between stress and diseases such as multiple sclerosis, breast cancer, Crohn’s disease, and osteoporosis. Saying no, said Vigue, is a critical skill—one that takes practice. If we don’t, we face burnout, and our work could end up suffering. When we overachieve, others around us don’t do as much, which makes us resentful and angry. The first step to quelling the compulsion to say yes to everything is to recognize the inner “no.”

Identify your values

Your core values define who you are. As yourself, “When do I feel really alive?” Conversely, ask “What drives me crazy?” Underlying the answers to both questions are your values.

Identify your top five values, which can become your compass when deciding whether to take on an opportunity. Does it align with your values? If not, say no.

Identify your priorities

Ask yourself where you’re dissatisfied, and you’ll figure out where things are out of balance in your life. Set three goals for your year (if you have more than that, nothing is a priority), and ask yourself whether the opportunity helps you achieve those goals.

Listen to your body

For overachievers, being presented with an opportunity triggers a stress response that we’ll do almost anything to get rid of—such as agreeing to something we don’t actually want to do. Learn to manage that response with the ABCs:

A: awareness—recognize that the stress response is happening
B: breathing—breathe deeply from the diaphragm, which helps trigger a relaxation response
C: choice—consciously decide what your response should be (and it may be a yes); give yourself some space away from your knee-jerk answer. “Get comfortable with silence,” added one of the attendees. “That awkward silence is not your job to fill.”

***

When you’re presented with an opportunity, try this decision model:

Is it aligned with my values?
Is it aligned with my priorities?
Do I have the time, energy, and resources?

If the answer to all three is yes, then your response can be yes. If the answer to any one of them is no, you might want to consider declining the opportunity.

Further ask yourself, “By saying yes to this, what am I saying no to?” Also ask yourself, “By saying no to this, what am I saying yes to?”

Peter Levesque of the Institute for Knowledge Mobilization said that he explicitly breaks down the year into available days: 365 days minus weekends, statutory holidays, and 10 sick days, leaving 240 days in the year. He then further breaks that down into months, then weeks, to get a realistic sense of how much time he has available—a literal time budget.

How do you say no? Just do it. “There’s nothing plainer than ‘no.'” said Vigue. No need for explanations, qualifications, or apologies. People will respect you when you say no and mean it. You could also buy yourself some time: tell them you’ll think about it and get back to them. Another strategy is the “no sandwich”: begin and end by acknowledging the positive aspects of the opportunity, but firmly say no in the middle.

If you’re a team leader, be cognizant that your team members may also have their own values and priorities, not to mention budgets for time, energy, and resources. Set group goals and let everyone know how they are accountable to those goals. If you’re taking on too much as a leader, ask yourself if it’s an issue of control. Figure out what you can automate, delegate, or delete.

Saying no is going to feel very uncomfortable at first, said Vigue. But once you get some practice, it will help you regain some balance in your life.

Karine Nicolay—IC Clear update (PLAIN 2013)

I posted about IC Clear earlier, when Katherine McManus spoke at the EAC-BC meeting about the clear communication certificate program. Project coordinator Karine Nicolay gave PLAIN 2013 an update:

The European Association of Distance Teaching Universities has joined IC Clear as a partner.
The goal is to launch the certificate course at the Clarity International conference next November.

IC Clear is supported by the European Commission’s Clear Writing Campaign and fills a gap in education and training. Stockholm University, one of the program’s associate partners, has had a language consultancy program (broader than just plain language) for thirty years, but it is only in Swedish. IC Clear has been able to draw on SU’s expertise to develop its program.

Demand for clear communication professions will grow, said Nicolay, because in many countries the illiteracy rate is high and government recognition of people’s right to understand means there will be more forthcoming legislation requiring clear communication.