Meredith Evans, Synlait Milk

Meredith Evans with sponsor Emma Harding (TechCommNZ)

Judges’ comment

Congratulations on all your hard work. We can see that you really understand why plain English is important, and that you use it in everything you do. It’s so important to make instructional documents clear and concise, and you’ve worked really hard to achieve this. We enjoyed reading your documents. Well done.

All your documents adhere to good plain English concepts, including using graphics and document design to aid understanding. You’ve made excellent choices in all areas to communicate IT and accounting information to your readers and users.

Media statement

I’m lucky enough to work as a technical communicator/trainer/support analyst in a small but dynamic Information Services team at Synlait Milk. As well as writing online help and training material for our enterprise resource planning system, M3, I also get to practise my technical communication and information design skills across a range of projects and applications. The best part of the job is the chance to interact directly with my users — if they can’t understand or use the documentation, it’s me who has to sort out any resulting mistakes! It means I’m always working hard to improve and innovate, in order to best meet their needs.

I’m really thrilled to be the winner of the Best Plain English Technical Communicator category of the 2015 Plain English Awards and I hope that one day Synlait Milk will have an entry for the Best Organisation category. I’d like to thank the organisers and sponsors of the Awards for their support and for providing the opportunity to take part.