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Chrissie Maher founded Plain English Campaign with the sole purpose of fighting gobbledygook, jargon and misleading public information. She launched it by shredding hundreds of official documents in Parliament Square. When a Metropolitan Police constable told Chrissie that no demonstrations were allowed, citing a lengthy unfathomable sentence from the Metropolitan Police Act 1839, Chrissie replied ‘You mean we’ve got to get off’. Surrounded by members of the news media, the constable had made Chrissie’s point as forcibly as the shredding itself.
Campaigning roots
Before founding Plain English Campaign, Chrissie spent many years during the late 60s and early 70s involved in community work, which most notably included:
- producing a community newspaper - the Tuebrook Bugle – that was written by local people in their own style
- launching Liverpool News, Britain's first newspaper for adults with reading difficulties
- setting up the Impact Foundation, a print shop and community group to teach typography and printing skills to ordinary people
- serving on the National Consumer Council, a public body established to give an independent voice to consumers in the UK, and
- creating the Form Market, a project to help people fill in forms and claim benefits.
The Tuebrook Bugle
In 1971, Chrissie set up a community newspaper ‘written for the people, by the people’. Chrissie and the small team she had gathered to work on the paper found that a lot of problems were caused by misunderstandings and a lack of communication. The need for plain English was obvious even then.
The Tuebrook Bugle was a big hit. It told people what was going on, in words they could understand. Suddenly the people of Tuebrook were not as powerless as they once thought they were - trees got planted, drains got cleaned, better books appeared on the shelves in the library and councillors were called to account for their actions.
After a while, the name of the newspaper was shortened to ‘The Bugle’ because people in surrounding areas wanted to get involved. The Bugle became more than just a voice for Tuebrook. And because it was so successful, what began in a small house in Liverpool encouraged other communities to publish their own newspapers.
Liverpool News
Due to Chrissie largely missing out on formal education, and not being able to read properly until her late teens, she understood the needs of adults with reading difficulties. Spurred on by this, in 1974 she set up Liverpool News, a newspaper in adult format but with simplified sentence structure and layout.
Written by Chrissie and a team of supporters from the Impact Foundation, the newspaper was a great success. After just one year it was being widely used in literacy classes all over the country. This was despite the fact that its content was devoted to news from Liverpool.
Chrissie's and her team’s writing style was very much a forerunner of the style we encourage to this day.
‘As patron of the Adult Literacy Basic Skills Unit (ALBSU) I have heard about the frustrations, embarrassments and restrictions caused by the vagaries of the written word. I also know about all those emotions from personal experience of trying to write rules for sports events and trying to write a book, never mind attempting to decode the instructions on the coffee machine! Over six million adults in the UK have difficulty reading everyday information such as newspapers, dosage instructions for medicines, bank statements and tax returns. Far more people have difficulty understanding the turgid offerings of some of the bureaucracies that house, support or tax them.'
‘Using plain English helps many of the most disadvantaged people in society. But the benefits for busy chief executives, lawyers and administrators are far greater. It is vital for organisations to be able to communicate clearly with their customers, policyholders, borrowers and tenants. No-one has the time or patience to wade through long sentences, legalese, small print or tortured English. People want to be able to absorb information quickly, easily and at first reading. Using plain English will help our readers achieve this aim.'
‘The fight for plain English did not start at this conference, nor will it end here. But the knowledge and experience you share over the next three days will take the campaign a little further.’
Letter from Buckingham Palace, of a public address delivered by the Princess Royal at one of our award ceremonies
The Form Market
By the mid-70s, the National Consumer Council (NCC) had heard about Chrissie’s work and invited her to join them as a member. At one of the council meetings in London, Chrissie’s idea for giving people information about state benefits they may be entitled to, and the help they need to claim them, was endorsed.
Chrissie’s idea received sponsorship from the NCC and ALRA (the Adult Literacy Resource Agency).
‘Gobbledygook may indicate a failure to think clearly, a contempt for one’s clients, or more probably a mixture of both. A system that can’t or won’t communicate is not a safe place for democracy.’
Michael Shanks, former chairman of the National Consumer Council
Chrissie assembled and managed a team to open the Form Market. In a converted shop in Salford, she used the skills she had developed on the Tuebrook Bugle and Liverpool News to combat official language, jargon and gobbledygook, in order to help people and small businesses to understand their rights and claim what they were entitled to.
The services provided included:
- help with filling in forms, which were usually poorly written, badly designed and filled with puzzling questions, and
- explaining written information in clear terms.
All the services proved invaluable to local people. But Chrissie kept asking herself why she and her Form Market colleagues had to spend so much time helping people to understand and fill in forms. Why weren’t they clear in the first place?
And so Plain English Campaign was born.
The campaign’s aims were summarised in its first publication.
Plain English Campaign wants to stop the hardship, confusion and waste caused by complicated forms.
All official forms and leaflets should be written in plain, simple English. So should all agreements about money, goods and services that are signed by members of the public.
Forms, leaflets and agreements should be easy to follow. They should be set out in a logical sequence with headings in the right places.
All government departments, local councils and companies should set up their own plain English action groups to rewrite
their forms, letters and agreements.
Raising awareness
While public bodies and other organisations were becoming aware of the campaign and its activities, pressure was needed to convince them to change their ways. We also needed to increase our profile. Chrissie aimed to meet both of these needs by holding an awards ceremony to both praise and shame. The success of this ceremony led to an annual awards event being held in December each year.
‘Bad English is always a sign, as Orwell suggested, of insincerity or sloppy thought. But it can be fought, with the aid of constant ridicule. And this is happening. I think Orwell would have been cheered by the condition of our common culture because of the sheer quantity of this necessary ridicule.
‘From the Plain English Campaign to Pseuds’ Corner in Private Eye, from the mockery of Gordon Brown’s ‘endogenous growth theory’ to the attacks on Sir Richard Scott’s double negatives, this remains a country passionately committed to plain speech and instinctive in its hostility to overblown English.’
Andrew Marr
British journalist, author, broadcaster and presenter
Annual awards
For many years we presented annual awards for the best and worst examples of public-facing documents. The main awards recognised organisations and individuals who genuinely made an effort to use clear and concise English. The Golden Bull awards (for gobbledygook) and Foot in Mouth awards (for baffling quotes from public figures) injected a sense of mischief into the proceedings.
Having famous presenters and supporters ensured our awards received local, national and international media attention.
‘Due to a frequent regrettable inability to prevent my presence in other locations, I find that I must convey to you my goodwill in a correspondence format. It was when I was still a juvenile future constitutional figurehead substitute that I first became sensitised by mother-tongue abuse awareness. How many of us, I wonder, when faced with pretentious gobbledygook and empty jargon, experience a kick start into despair mode? My feelings towards all of you at today’s awards are, attitudinally, those of enormous encouragement…
‘God bless the Plain English Campaign’.
King Charles, then the Prince of Wales