We’re all winners here at Talk Normal, but today I’m a tiny bit more of a winner than you are.
I haven’t actually won anything, you understand. Yet.
A very pleasant person from the Plain English Campaign told me that Talk Normal has been nominated for a Plain English Champion award.
It’s not the first time I have earned a nomination on merit, of course: in 1990 I was nominated for redundancy.
I don’t find out out if I’m a winner until the end of the year but, in the proud tradition of companies who haven’t actually won but don’t want you to notice, I intend to squeeze this particular orange for all the juice I can get. Maybe I will leverage my reputation enhancement strategy by putting news of this not-quite-award in a giant email signature, with the word “nominated” in tiny tiny tiny yellow type.
Meanwhile, put your weight behind the Plain English Campaign, not least because it invented the name ploddledygook for police jargon.
At last year’s Plain English Campaign awards, a Golden Bull was awarded to the Foreign Commonwealth Office for a jargon-filled job description. The FCO graciously acknowledged that plain English was a better way to communicate and even produced their plain English translation of the original text, which can be seen on our Golden Bull 2010 winners page .