Judge: Plain English Champion category

Sarah has been involved with the WriteMark Plain English Awards since 2008. She and her team at the Cancer Society won 5 Awards for the cancer information they produced together. After winning the Best Organisation Award in 2012 she was asked to judge entries in the Plain English Champions category. It’s a role she thoroughly enjoys because she gets the opportunity to read about all the intelligent ways New Zealand organisations are adopting plain English principles. “Plain English has really taken off in New Zealand. I see it included in communications strategies and competencies for roles in many different fields now and it gives me heart to see how committed NZ writers are to using plain language in documents.”

Sarah has moved to Fire and Emergency New Zealand to be one their technical writers. “There’s still a lot of work to be done. We need to keep stressing the importance of communicating with our audiences in a clear and respectful way because it’s easy to slip back into ways that create barriers for people accessing vital information”.

2017 Plain English Awards judges