Category: Editors

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.

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GD: I brought a few little…

JC: Oh, you brought useful things. I just brought pretty things.

GD: Well, my pretty things are all online. And here’s one I wrote.

 

 

 

 

 

 

JC: Yes, I remember that. I have it on my Kindle.

GD: Yeah. And it’s so beautifully designed.

JC: Kathy [Kaulbach] did it?

GD: Kathy did it.

So I think one of the really important things is that you need a designer who understands plain language. Otherwise, you don’t end up… I did a wonderful little booklet for people on social assistance or looking at social assistance. And they wouldn’t let me name the designer or have a say in the design. To their credit, I locked them in a room for four hours with me, and I said, “Nobody’s leaving till we’re done.” Because I had things to hit them up with, and I could see how—you know, these are social workers. They’re out of their minds 100% of the time. And they agreed to it, and we did it. And then I looked at the front cover of the book, and it was all these nice middle-class people. And I thought, “What are you thinking? Nobody will see themselves. They will just see another middle-class effort to guide and control them.”

JC: To fix them.

GD: To fix them, yeah.

JC: Remember we wrote that article on plain language design for a graphic—what was it called? The Ascender? It was like this newsletter for graphic designers, and you and I wrote an article on design for plain language and why that was as important as the actual words. Because nobody would get to the words if the design didn’t draw them in. That was ages ago.

GD: Ages ago, yeah. A long, long time ago. Continue reading “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 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. Continue reading “The plain language movement in Canada, 1980–1995: Interview with Nicole Watkins Campbell”