Plain Language Movement

The Plain Language Movement is an effort to eliminate unnecessarily complex language from academia, government, law, and business.

International and national organizations in the movement include:

  • Plain Language Association International (PLAIN) was formed in 1993 as the Plain Language Network. Its membership is international; it was incorporated as a non-profit organization in Canada in 2008.
  • Clarity is an international association promoting plain legal language. The organization publishes a journal.
  • The Plain Language Information and Action Network (also known as PLAIN) is a group of volunteer US federal employees working to improve communications from the federal government to the public.
  • The Center for Plain Language is a US-based nonprofit organization promoting the use of plain language in the public and private sectors. The organization hosts annual symposia in Washington DC. The Center also gives ClearMark Awards to outstanding examples of clear communication, and WonderMark awards to examples of truly bad communication.

Organizations that have endorsed plain language include the Legal Writing Institute, the Canadian Bar Association, and the Canadian Bankers Association.

Read more about Plain Language Movement:  Aims, The Plain Writing Act of 2010

Famous quotes containing the words plain, language and/or movement:

    “Behold, Esau my brother is a hairy man, and I am a smooth man.”
    —Bible: Hebrew Jacob, in Genesis, 27:11.

    To his mother Rebekah, explaining how the blind Isaac might discover the ploy of his pretending to be Esau. “Esau was a cunning hunter, a man of the field; and Jacob was a plain man, dwelling in tents.” (25:27)

    “The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
    —Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (b. 1929)

    “For what we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of past and present realities—a willing movement of a man’s soul with the larger sweep of the world’s forces—a movement towards a more assured end than the chances of a single life.”
    —George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)