Call for proposals – Clear Writing for Europe 2023

The European Commission is inviting representatives and practitioners involved in plain language to present at this event which will showcase ways in which plain language can support European democracy and transparency through clear language.

The main conference will try to answer:

  • how plain language acts as a tool for democracy and outreach to the public;
  • how we can make clear writing the default setting, and use it to reach a wider audience (drawing together good practices from across the EU);
  • how can plain language help us communicate on complex topics like climate and energy.

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Training – Legal Drafting

Tomorrow, Thursday, 1 April 2021, at noon-2:00 p.m. (EST), the Kimble Center for Legal Drafting in the United States has announced its second seminar — free to lawyers, law students, and anyone else interested in improving their professional writing.

The seminar will be presented by Professors Joseph Kimble (WMU-Cooley), Mark Cooney (WMU-Cooley), and Patrick Berry (University of Michigan). These three experienced and widely published experts will pack 30 useful tips into a fast-paced two hours. Continue reading

The Writer’s Diet test

I found this wonderful tool recently and just had to share it with you. There are several tests to evaluate how readable texts are, but the results of this one are such fun!

Helen Sword, who offers the free online tool, is a scholar, award-winning teacher, and poet who has published books and articles on modernist literature, higher education pedagogy, digital poetics, and academic writing. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and now teaches in the Centre for Academic Development at the University of Auckland.

To try it out, I entered a sample of text that was used by the press a few months ago as an example of impenetrable legalese (see this post for more details). You can see the results in the screenshot below.

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