Nominations are open for the WriteMark New Zealand Plain English Awards.
Has your brain recently been strained by a government department document or website, or a business contract you couldn’t understand? Now is your chance to fight back.
Entries are being sought for the annual WriteMark New Zealand Plain English Awards. The awards recognise concise, well-structured and easily understood documents – physical and online. But they also reserve Brainstrain Awards for those organisations which present information in a confusing and baffling way.
As awards founder and chief executive of Write (a company dedicated to helping organisations improve their written communications) Lynda Harris says: “I come across thousands of documents that do not deliver information as well as the writer intended. At best these documents just waste precious time. At worst they cause intense frustration or even great suffering. Many New Zealanders have stories about missing out on benefits or being penalised because they didn’t fulfil some requirements; or found they weren’t protected against financial loss because they didn’t understand something they had signed.”
Consumer agrees. That’s why we support the awards and specifically the People’s Choice category for Best Plain English Documents and Website, and the Worst Brainstrain Document and Website.
And while the Brainstrain Awards provide entertainment, there is a serious side. In 2008 the ACC website was nominated for a Brainstrain Award. People found it too hard to understand. ACC took it on the chin and spent nine months rewriting and restructuring the site. It won the Best Website Public Sector in following year’s awards.
Other categories include Best Plain English Sentence Transformation, Best Plain English Technical Communicator and this year there will be awards for best financial documents and disclosure statements.
The overall winner (Plain English champion) receives a prize of $10,000 worth of Write services to be used on a plain English project.
Entries opened on 1 August and close 30 September. Winners will be announced in a national media campaign and at an awards ceremony. For more information on the awards and how to enter go to: www.plainenglishawards.org.nz
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