Bretton Woods Project
World Bank speak

stylewriter
You can buy a programme to edit your text for all kinds of non plain writing problems. Even if you don't buy the programme it is useful to read about what it checks for!

Readability
A brief overview with some handy lists

Joe Kimble on Plain Language--The Plain Language Association International

Garbl's Writing Center
Gary B. Larson's portal to an editorial style manual, annotated directory of writing Web sites, concise writing guide, personalized advice and writing forum.
Neat.

A.Word.A.Day Home Page : vocabulary, wordpower, words, language, english, dictionary, lexicon, logophile, wordsmith

Guardian style guide
Comes in three versions. The downloads are quite large.

Egg-bound
Egg-bound by Mark Adler first published in Clarity 41 (April 1998)


Before:

If the rent hereby reserved or any part thereof shall be in arrear and unpaid for twenty-one days after becoming due and payable (whether formally demanded or not) or if there shall be any breach of any covenants or agreements on the part of the Lessee herein contained then and in any such case it shall be lawful for the Lessor at any time thereafter to re-enter upon the demised premises or any part thereof in the name of the whole and immediately thereupon this demise shall absolutely cease and determine but without prejudice to any right of action or remedy of the Lessor in respect of any antecedent breach of any covenant or agreement on the part of the Lessee herein contained


After:

The landlord may end the term by entering the property if:
(A) any rent is 21 days late (even if not formally demanded); or
(B) the tenant breaks any other obligation.

Articles and information on plain language

Rapport Communications - Design - Interactive Print Design
Sub-title - interactive design - bah humbug.
A fascinating tour round the theory of layout and design and its links to plain language.

President Roosevelt was not impressed with a memo informing him that 'Such preparations shall be made as will completely obscure all Federal and non-Federal buildings occupied by the Federal Government during an air raid for any period of time from visibility by reason of internal or external illumination. Such obscuration may be obtained either by black-out construction or by termination of the illumination.'

'Tell them,' Roosevelt told the writer, 'that in buildings where they have to keep the work going to put something over the windows; and, in buildings where they can let the work stop for a while, turn out the lights.'

Clear Language and Design (CLAD) - Home Page

Mindfulness in Plain English

NYU Press - Collateral Language post 9/11

KnowledgeBoard: the European Knowledge Management (KM) Community - KM for Beginners

A knew acronym KM - plain language must fit in here somewhere!

Stephen Jay Gould: Anything, even the conceptually most complex material, can be written for general audiences without any dumbing down. Of course you have to explain things carefully. This goes back to Galileo, who wrote his great books as dialogues in Italian, not as treatises in Latin. And to Darwin, who wrote The Origin of Species for general readers. I think a lot of people pick up Darwin's book and assume it must be a popular version of some technical monograph, but there is no technical monograph. That's what he wrote. So what I'm doing is part of a great humanistic tradition.


Mother Jones, January/February 1997

"People like Flesch and Gunning studied what adults read. They found that all successful magazines and English best sellers, including the King James Version of the Bible, kept their reading level at or below the 12th grade. For example, Gunning found: Francis Bacon used an average 28 words a sentence. Captain John Smith used an average 16 words a sentence. Thomas Paine, writing "The American Crisis" ("These are the times that try men's souls…"), wrote at a 7th-grade reading level. Gunning wrote, "It appears from our own investigation that in all ages there have been men with something to say who wrote comparatively simply.""

Fight the FOG

Short and to the point - pure cream. And all downloadable as a pdf file!

Wordsmith Associates: Related Links

A short page of goodish links

Assessing Readability - SMOG etc

" SMOG:
There are a number of formulas to assess the readability of a text. The formulas fall into two major categories: those that are computer generated and those that are calculated by hand. The most frequently used computerized formulas include the Flesch Grade Level Formula and the Flesch-Kincaid Index. Newer word processing programs often have the Flesch formula built into the software for easy use. For those who do not have a computer, or conduct readability tests in the field, there are a number of formulas that can be calculated by hand. Hand-calculated formulas include the FOG method, Fry formula and the SMOG. The SMOG was created by McLaughlin in 1969 and predicts 100% comprehension."