Awards for best and worst English

Are you tired of businesses calling their products "solutions"? Or referring to the future as "going forward"?

Entries have opened for the 2010 WriteMark New Zealand Plain English Awards, where members of the public can nominate the organisations they believe are the best and worst users of language.

Documents and websites deemed by the judging panel to be the most difficult to understand will receive a Brainstrain award.

Businesses and organisations that make an effort to use plain language can also enter their own documents in the other categories of the competition.

The Best Organisation award - which was won by the Office of the Banking Ombudsman last year - comes with a prize valued at $10,000.

"The awards are about promoting an awareness of plain English to the public so there becomes a public expectation for documents to be written in a language that we can all understand," said awards founder Lynda Harris.

Vodafone took out the Brainstrain website award for its pre-pay terms and conditions last year.

The Real Estate Institute of New Zealand (REINZ) also won a Brainstrain award for its Sales of Real Estate by Auction document.

Harris said the REINZ attended the ceremony and accepted its award.

The worst offenders for using dense and jargon-laden English were Government organisations, as well as law and financial firms, Harris said.

She said businesses needed to think about the purpose of their documents before writing them.

"The purpose is to connect with consumers so they will buy products and services," she said. "If the reader doesn't understand what you are talking about then you are not doing a good job in business."

Harris said people with lower levels of literacy could be disadvantaged by dense and difficult to read documents.

"Because of the work we do ... we see the waste and the disadvantage to individuals and organisations through poor communication."

The awards will be presented in a ceremony at Parliament's Banquet Hall on September 3.

ON THE WEB
www.plainenglishawards.org.nz