2010 WriteMark |
Friday 3 September 2010 |
New Zealand Plain English Awards |
|
ACC
Winner: Best Sentence Transformation
Maryland Spencer from ACC, with judge Neil James
Media release
Winning a prize at the Plain English Awards was something of a coup for ACC technical writer Maryland Spencer.
“I’ve been a fan of plain English for a long time,” said Maryland, who won the Best Sentence Transformation Award for wrestling the breath-taking sentence
“The service assists to restore a client’s independence to the maximum extent practicable by using interventions to diagnose or alleviate pain and discomfort. The service is intended to function in conjunction with a multimodal approach to enhance functional outcome by approaching pain management from interventional, psychological, and functionally based modalities.”
into the altogether more palatable
“The service helps the client regain their greatest possible independence by using interventions to diagnose or alleviate pain and discomfort. The service will be given alongside psychological and physical services.”
“There are two diseases that plain English cures,” said Maryland: “the illness of using 5 big words when 2 plain ones will do (known as ‘ego-speak’), and the compulsion to give every last detail whether the user needs it or not (known as ‘irrelevant brain-boggle’).
“To prove a point I invented this statement: “We have an ineluctable avoidance regarding opacity, via imperative trans-substantiation of content, to corroborate elucidation.” It means “We must ensure clarity.”
Maryland Spencer said she was delighted with the award, and thanked WriteMark for promoting plain English.
ACC also won the 2009 Plain English Award for the best website (www.acc.co.nz).
Sponsors
We would like to thank the following sponsors for their support in 2010.
