TED Community » Sandra Martins

More About Me

I'm passionate about

Simplicity, citizenship, clarity, transparency

People don't know that I'm good at

spotting small creatures from a moving car

Comments

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• A reply on Talk: Sandra Fisher-Martins: The right to understand

  Apr 7 2012: Thank you, Nuno :-)

• A reply on Talk: Sandra Fisher-Martins: The right to understand

  Apr 7 2012: That's great! They should get in touch with Clarity, the plain legal language association, for support. Clarity's 2008 conference was in Mexico City. At the time, the Mexican government had an initiative called Lenguaje Cuidadano, which aimed to train public servants to use plain language when communicating with citizens.
  It takes time for things to change, Olivia. Don't despair. Get in touch with people going through similar challenges and learn from each other.

• A reply on Conversation: How can we simplify legal/business language?

  Jan 28 2012: You raise an interesting point. There are, indeed, situations when simplified information can lead to a false sense of "complete understanding". It is up to the author of that information to make it clear that there is more to it and that the reader should not assume otherwise. However, the alternative -- to bombard the reader with every complex detail -- seems to me like a completely worthless exercise.
  
  If your doctor explains your diagnosis and your treatment options in plain language, you'll be in a better position to make a decision. You don't need to know all the complex chemical and physiological processes involved in each one of them. And you're unlikely to take the matter in your own hands and perform surgery on yourself or mix up chemicals to make your own pills.

• A reply on Conversation: How can we simplify legal/business language?

  Jan 28 2012: One of the most common criticism of plain language is that it can never be as precise as legal language. My experience tells me the exact opposite: often, the convoluted language used in laws, contracts, etc. hides imprecisions and ambiguities, many (but not all) of them unintentional.

• A reply on Conversation: How can we simplify legal/business language?

  Jan 28 2012: Sometimes there are good intentions behind those laws. For instance, a financial regulator might demand that banks supply all sorts of information, in large print, hoping that will make it easier for consumers to understand what they're buying. Unfortunately, large print and lots of acronyms do not equal clarity.

• A reply on Conversation: How can we simplify legal/business language?

  Jan 28 2012: The two things must go hand-in-hand: increase literacy levels and make public documents clearer.
  
  Even in countries where literacy levels are fairly high, like Sweden, plain language is still important -- a high-literacy reader (let's say, a doctor) is as baffled by a rental contract, a letter from Inland Revenue or a piece of legislation as anyone else.

• A reply on Conversation: How can we simplify legal/business language?

  Jan 28 2012: That's great. I heard that the journal Nature was doing something similar. It shows that plain language is not just for low literacy readers. Everyone benefits from materials that are easier to read - we all have so much information to get through everyday.

• A reply on Conversation: How can we simplify legal/business language?

  Jan 28 2012: When I said that "the problem arises when the deal is done" I was referring to how a business changes the way it communicates with its customers once they signed on the dotted line. Pre-sales communications are friendly and simple, post-sale communications (contracts, bills, statements, customer service letters, etc.) tend to be much harder to figure out. The marketing experts give way to the legal department or to the IT guys that format the bills, and no-one seems to care about communication anymore. But their customers still care, they still want to be treated nicely and with respect.

• A reply on Conversation: How can we simplify legal/business language?

  Jan 28 2012: You are absolutely right, Paul. Even plain-language practitioners can disagree when it come to defining what they do.
  Currently, we seem to be moving towards a definition that is more outcome-focused than method-focused. This means that a text/document/website/etc. is considered to be in plain language when the intended audience can easily read it, understand it and use it.
  The guidelines you mention are useful but do not, per se, guarantee this result. And, as you say, we need more research on the effectiveness of such guidelines.

• A reply on Conversation: How can we simplify legal/business language?

  Jan 28 2012: This is a pragmatic solution and it has been tried before. From October 2010 to December 2011, the Portuguese government published plain-language summaries of all new decree-laws (laws made by the government, not by Parliament). These were published, along with the laws, in Portuguese and English, in the online version of the Official Gazette.
  
  About 200 summaries were published to mixed reviews. Regular folk loved them, legal folk tended to hate them. Main criticism: the government had no right to "interpret" the law, that was the lawyers' and the courts' job.
  I'm not legally trained - my part in this project was to write the summaries, which would then have to be approved by the government - so I couldn't argue with some of the more conceptual views. But I think that resistance is always to be expected when you try something new and, particularly, when you start messing with certain groups' power.
  
  If you'd like to see some of the summaries, visit this Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/leiclara?ref=ts