There’s been no shortage of public apologies of late for a dizzying range of errors. Take these four: A mining company ‘misplaced’ a tiny but deadly radioactive capsule somewhere on a 1400 km stretch of road. A politician who wore a Nazi...
I’ve been playing around with OpenAI’s new platform ChatGPT. An artificial intelligence product, it uses deep machine learning to trawl vast volumes of information – hundreds of billions of data – to generate responses to questions. It can create stories...
I watched an old episode of Spicks and Specks recently, which closed with this great Weird Al Yankovic clip. It’s a parody of Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues and very clever. Here’s an example from the lyrics. Rise to vote, sir Do geese...
Recently I came across a website advocating plain English.It made me happy, so I read further.The Australian Clinical Trials Alliance advocated a plain language title for research so people could find and understand it.“In the case of clinical research, the audience...
𝐘𝐨𝐮’𝐯𝐞 𝐡𝐢𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐧𝐚𝐢𝐥 𝐫𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐧𝐨𝐬𝐞.𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐭’𝐬 𝐚 𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐝 𝐧𝐮𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐰𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐨𝐰.𝐘𝐨𝐮’𝐯𝐞 𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐚 𝐜𝐚𝐧 𝐨𝐟 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐬, 𝐧𝐨𝐰 𝐥𝐢𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝐢𝐭. I teach 𝐆𝐞𝐭 𝐈𝐭 𝐖𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐞 to help people take their writing from clunky to compelling. But we all get it wrong sometimes, and the results can be really...
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Plain English Bill going through the New Zealand parliament. The bill passed – it’s now law! This piece in The Age by David Astle describes why plain language is so important and introduces Milton A Smith’s concept...
