Proceedings: Conference on Corporate Communication 2012 Page 1

Taking Plain Language Seriously? “That’s a Really Big Ask”.
Caroline McKinnon & Roslyn Petelin
Writing, Editing and Publishing Program
School of English, Media Studies and Art History
The University of Queensland, Australia
c.mckinnon@uq.edu.au & r.petelin@uq.edu.au
This paper presents the recommendations resulting from a research project that investigated the
extent to which a large Australian local government organization has been able to implement
plain language in their correspondence with their customers. Our qualitative-research approach
included collecting customer correspondence sent out by the organization over a one-week period
in February 2011; a survey of staff within the organization, along with follow-up interviews with
those who volunteered to be interviewed; and a series of focus-group discussions with customers
of the organization. The customers rated the writing samples on a scale of 1–10; the samples
averaged 4.73 out of 10, indicating that the principles of plain language are not well understood
nor practised by staff within the organization. Other findings revealed that the organization has
relied on an ineffective writing-training model and that much of the writing is done by
inappropriate staff. We suggest ways in which the organization might alter their current hiring
and writing practices to enhance the quality of their correspondence and their relationship with
their customers.
Keywords: Organizational writing practices, Plain language, Training.
Paper Type: Research paper
Abstracts of <strong>Conference</strong> <strong>Proceedings</strong>: <strong>Conference</strong> on Corporate Communication 2012
Page 57