Welcome
We can help you use plain-English principles to clarify your web and printed communications.
We provide:
- accreditation with the Clear English Standard logo for your public documents
- high-quality writing-skills courses for your staff
- distance-learning courses to improve every individual's writing skills
- accreditation of your website with the Winning Website logo, and
- rapid, affordable editing of your internal and external documents.
We work for all kinds of organizations — government departments, financial services companies, registered social landlords, regulators, ombudsmen, local authorities, pension schemes, hospital trusts, utilities, telecom companies and international law firms.
They appreciate what we offer — a business-class service delivered by published authors and editors at a sensible cost.
The company is personally managed by Martin Cutts, author of 'The Oxford Guide to Plain English' and 'Lucid Law'. Editors and course presenters include Sarah Carr, Ruth Thornton, Christina Gleeson and Judy Brown.
Plain Language Commission is independent of Government.
News
- The Electoral Commission’s ‘Making your mark’ project aims to make voter materials more user-friendly. We will be represented on its virtual advisory group. Read more at http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/document-summary?assetid=67184.
- Congratulations to the Financial Services Authority and to Community Legal Advice, whose websites (http://www.whataboutmoney.info and http://www.communitylegaladvice.org.uk) have reached gold standard under our Winning Website scheme.
- BBC3 recently commissioned us to report on the readability of Facebook’s Principles and Terms of Use. The report, “How clear are the style and language of Facebook’s Principles and Terms of Use”, was used in a documentary (‘Mischief — Your Identity for Sale’), shown at 9pm on 11 September 2008.
- We've 2 other new articles on our website: “Linguistic lingo for lawyers: word classes” (first published in the recent Clarity journal) and “Administrative language in the UK: 18 months in Pikestaff features” (presented recently at a conference at Ruhr University, Germany).
- For our latest newsletter, download “Pikestaff” now.