Search results for plain english
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Plain English, put plainly
Found in Blog / Published 25 February 2015 / By Joanna McLeod ,
In December the Assisted Digital team hosted a plain English workshop at the National Library as a follow up to our Assisted Digital Summit.
We designed the afternoon to hear about plain English from three perspectives: a customer, a team in government grappling with plain English every day, and an organisation able to offer an all-of-government perspective.
In our context as government service providers, plain English can be defined as: information audiences can understand the first time when… -
Getting government to use plain English
Found in Blog / Published 25 November 2014 / By Corinne Cordes ,
… Small business owners, community workers, public servants, and IT entrepreneurs came together to explore how to help people transact with government digitally, and how to provide alternatives for those who can’t.
Although the need for government to use plain English (or plain language) falls outside the scope of Assisted Digital, people attending thought it was important, as everything we do in the digital channel needs to be easy for people to understand. So we thought we’d pick up the conver… -
Plain English Awards - close, but no cigar
Found in Blog / Published 28 November 2014 / By Victoria Wray ,
No shiny trophy for us this year, but it was great to be a finalist again in the WriteMark Plain English Awards. It doesn’t matter that we didn’t win because it’s not about us. It’s about the people who use our site, who have to navigate their way through the multitude of government sites. That’s why we’re really happy to see all those government agencies who were finalists and winners. And thrilled that there’s work happening across government to make plain language just part of what we do.
Wh… -
Govt.nz wins 2017 WriteMark Plain English Award
Found in News
Govt.nz has scooped the 2017 WriteMark best Plain English website award. This is the second time Govt.nz has received the award, after winning it in 2015.
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Plain English Awards: Third time’s a charm for Govt.nz
Found in Blog / Published 20 November 2015 / By Danielle Crooks ,
Our Govt.nz team were thrilled to win ‘Best Plain English Website’ at the 2015 WriteMark Plain English Awards held in Wellington last night. This is the third year in a row we have made it to the finals of these awards but the first time we get to take a nice shiny trophy home.
It takes a huge amount of effort to make information about government services easy to read and understand, so for the team to win this award — which is the premier industry benchmark for high standards in plain English… -
Plain language
Found in Standards & guidance / Content, design and UX / Content design guidance / Writing style / Plain language
The Plain Language Act 2022 requires all public service agencies and crown agents to use plain language. For everyone else, plain language is not required but is highly recommended for readability.
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Words to avoid and specialist words
Found in Standards & guidance / Content, design and UX / Content design guidance / Words to avoid and specialist words
Check which words you should avoid to make content easy to understand.
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Digital Service Standard: Case Study - Building an accessible website for The New Zealand Disability Karate Association
Found in Blog / Published 22 March 2018 / By Stephen Clarke , Stephen Hilson ,
The web standards were used to create a better web site for the students of the New Zealand Disability Karate Association.
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Digital.govt.nz's 1st User Testing Workshop
Found in Blog / Published 09 October 2017 / By Stephen Hilson ,
… drive that perception. Here are a few key points:
Content must be kept up to date (eg "Last Updated: 1st April 2001" is not good)
Archive old material; it may be of use in the future
Content must reflect current thinking
Content must be in plain English with no spelling mistakes
The site must look professional and authoritative
The site must be relevant and not a marketing tool
Has to be fast especially when using mobile devices (don’t make me use all my mobile data).
Finding StuffBe… -
Measuring content improvement
Found in Blog / Published 05 June 2013 / By Alison Jack ,
… the Government web community, I talked about turning on the Flesch Reading Ease score function in Microsoft Word.
This tool can help you determine:
how easy or hard text is to read
how difficult the words are — rare words are less well known than our plain English words
how difficult the sentences are — long, complicated sentences cause more difficulty than short, simple sentences.
The Flesch Reading Ease test applies a mathematical formula that measures the length of words and sentences, and…
