Melodee Mercer
Communications Specialist, USA
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Melodee Mercer is based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. She is best known as Plain Language Instructor for the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) where she has worked for 32 years. In this capacity, she worked for the White House in Vice President Gore's National Partnership for Reinventing Government office. While there, she wrote much of the letter-writing guidance on the www.plainlanguage.gov website. The US Plain Writing Law directs government agencies to that guidance for help learning how to write in plain language.
One of her legacies to VA is the award-winning satellite course, Reader-Focused Writing (RFW), in which she trained over 7200 employees to write in plain language via satellite. Melodee has received many awards for her plain language work, including the IRS Deputy Commissioner's Award, Vice President Gore's No Gobbledygook Award, the President's Hammer Award, the US Distance Learning Association's Outstanding Instructor in Government Award, and the International Communicator's Crystal Award of Excellence.
Melodee is a member of the Plain Language Action and Information Network (made up of government employees) and was a founding board member of the non-profit Center for Plain
Language. For the past five years, Melodee produced their US ClearMark Award Ceremony, which
garnered very positive national publicity.
She specialises in collecting qualitative data (focus groups, document testing) and producing news packages (script writing, interviewing). Melodee is also an on-air interviewer, actor, moderator, and host. She combined those skills to produce humorous short videos for the Center. They can be seen by going to www.DemandToUnderstand.org.