News
Plain English campaign news articles
Legal rulings judged 'overlong'
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- Created on Thursday, 09 February 2017 15:18
Why ‘teenage-ready T&Cs' could benefit us all
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- Created on Thursday, 12 January 2017 15:27
Supporters often contact us to complain about horrific terms and conditions. A recent report from the Children’s Commissioner for England provides a perfect example of why companies often hide behind gibberish.
The Commissioner, appointed by the Government to ‘represent the interests of young people’, presented their findings as part of their ‘growing up digital’ campaign. The Commissioner lays out their aims with the following statement.
Plain English Campaign Awards 2016
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- Created on Thursday, 01 December 2016 09:53
It’s Plain English Campaign awards day.
This year we’re delighted to applaud the likes of Mr Justice Peter Jackson, James Westhead, SSE, Bank of Ireland, the NSPCC and NHS Health Scotland.
Government Latin ban
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- Created on Monday, 25 July 2016 14:27
The Government has taken the surprising step of banning Latin abbreviations from its websites.
So e.g., i.e. and etc will all soon be booted off GOV.UK pages, apparently because foreign readers find them ‘difficult to read’. A spokesman said the phrases could even confuse English speakers who were ‘under stress or in a hurry’.
NHS secrecy row
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- Created on Friday, 18 November 2016 16:07
This time last year, the NHS was ‘restructured’, apparently to make sure the needs of specific parts of the UK got the services they needed. Each new area was told it had to provide Sustainability and Transformation Plans (STPs), which would set out what that individual area needed, and how it would go about delivering those needs.
As part of that, all those different areas of the NHS came together in January this year to form 44 STP ‘footprints’, which would show a bigger picture of what was needed and where, and what was being done to help the patients in each area. The results of these plans and footprints would then supposedly help put into place structured five-year plans.
Bank of England jargon far too taxing
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- Created on Friday, 07 October 2016 11:02
For decades now, we at Plain English Campaign have added our voice to those justifiably complaining about jargon in a number of areas. Financial jargon may well be at the top of the list of complaints we’ve received, and things don’t seem to be improving.
And with Brexit officially on the horizon (March/April has been mentioned) we really do need to know what is going on with the country’s banks and, in turn, our own finances.
Councils ignore plain English guidelines
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- Created on Friday, 09 September 2016 15:53
You may recall recent Government guidelines that made plain English ‘mandatory for all of Gov.UK’. Well, it seems that ‘mandatory’ means different things to different councils.
A recent independent report looked closely at up to 100 pages on 191 local authority websites. The findings suggest that 82% of the information checked is ‘confusing readers by failing to use plain English’.
More beauty product nonsense
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- Created on Wednesday, 31 August 2016 14:06
Have you ever bought a skin-care product after/despite hearing some impressive-sounding gobbledygook? The beauty product industry has seemingly always used hefty doses of waffle when marketing its creams, oils and ‘exfoliating’ gels.
But how many of the claims made about said products bear scrutiny? Unsurprisingly, very few.
