Plain English Campaign

We’ve edited, rewritten, clarified and Crystal-Mark approved over 23,000 documents worldwide since 1979.

As part of our 40th Anniversary celebrations and to mark a new partnership – and in a slight break from tradition – we’re releasing some of our award nominees a little earlier than usual. We’ve also created some new categories to mark our Confused.com sponsorship of this year’s awards. Please note that these are not award winners. Award winners will be announced in early December.

Confused.com considers 2019 ‘the year of confusion’ and we can only agree. There are those who have helped make some sense of an often baffling year, and those who have only contributed to the general bafflement. This early release contains a few culprits of the latter variety. For more plain English villains, and all the heroes fighting against obfuscation and gobbledygook, tune in again for the full and final list of winners and losers in early December.

Please send in your award entries - we're almost halfway through the year (!) and while we already have some excellent candidates, we could always do with a few more. Email info@plainenglish.co.uk or get in touch via our social media pages right up until the end of November. Thanks!

From May small businesses will need to be GDPR-ready. What does this mean?

The way companies communicate with their users, and how they handle and process the information they hold about their users, will soon need to change. This is so all company practice falls in line with new GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) guidelines. The guidelines are EU-led, but identical guidelines will almost certainly be written into post-Brexit UK legislation.

You’re probably aware of the upcoming GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) deadline (and if you’re not, you really should be). But will how you hold, share and use information be fit for purpose once that deadline has passed?

The children’s commissioner for England, Anne Longfield, has produced ‘child-friendly’ plain English versions of Facebook’s terms and conditions.

We’ve often highlighted the need to simplify online terms and conditions on platforms such as Instagram and YouTube. Many users of those sites probably still don’t realize how their images and footage might be used once posted online.

A website that puts obstacles in front of its audience is not doing its job properly. Get rid of any on your website, and get our Crystal Mark accreditation to boot.

Obviously, easy-to-understand text is very important. But what if that text is badly laid out, difficult to read or hard to find?