A colleague of mine in another country wants to improve her report writing and writing for the web. She works in a government water & sanitation project. English is not her first language. She has a number of audiences she must write for, via various reports, briefing papers, project reports and the web: donors (mostly foreign governments), other government offices in her own country, the media in her own country and residents of her country, especially those her office is trying to help.

I think resources on plain language are the best guidance for writers anywhere. I use my journalism training and experience, which was steeped in plain language, to write reports, and at UN offices, I got a tremendous amount of great feedback from colleagues about my reports, along the lines of “Wow, I could understand this!”

Here are the free online resources I’m recommending to my colleague. Note that some of these resources link to even more resources:

• Write to Reward Your Reader, from the Harvard Business Review

• US Federal Government Plain Language promotion & resources. Plain language makes it easier for the public to read, understand, and use government communications.

• Five Steps to Plain Language. From the Center for Plain Language.

• Plain Language Templates, Tools and Training. From the Center for Plain Language.

• Plain Language Materials & Resources for communicating regarding public health. From the CDC.

• Communicate Health, a health education and communication firm specializing in improving health literacy through user-centered design, research, and content development. Resources promote usability and accessibility of public health materials.

• ProPublica experiments with ultra-accessible plain language in stories about people with disabilities. Nieman Journalism Lab, based at Harvard, “an attempt to help journalism figure out its future in an Internet age.”

What would YOU recommend for my colleague? Say what you would recommend in the comments.

Also see:

• Humanitarians explain their jobs – badly (humor)
• Awards for plain language
• Why & how to make volunteering as accessible as possible
• Research Explaining How Websites Encourage Volunteering & Philanthropy
• Making certain volunteers feel unwelcomed because of your language
• Do you welcome people with your language?
• Systemic Exclusion in Volunteer Engagement
• How to counter the ongoing drop in volunteer firefighter numbers (includes how language used by firefighters about younger people discourages those people from volunteering)

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