Your chance to change the way New Zealand communicates!

In 2019 we’re running just the People’s Choice Awards. The full Plain English Awards will return in 2020.

You can make a difference! Help us celebrate a really good document or webpage. Or let us know about a really bad one. Send in your nominations now.

The People’s Choice category has two awards:

• Best Plain English Communication
• Worst Brainstrain Communication

Worst Brainstrain Communication

This award reveals, in good humour, the document or webpage most notable for confusing and dumbfounding its target audience with obscurity and gobbledygook.

By putting these confusing documents and webpages under the spotlight, we hope that the organisations responsible will rewrite them in beautifully plain English.

Submit your nomination

Nominations for the 2019 People’s Choice Awards close on 30 August.

To enter the 2019 Awards, use the button below.

Please email [email protected] if you have any questions.

What you need to know

The ideal entry for the Brainstrain award is a publicly available or widely used document or webpage that causes problems for many people.

Documents or webpages nominated in either of the People’s Choice categories must:

• be whole documents or webpages, not extracts
• be in current use for business purposes
• be owned by an organisation that operates in New Zealand
• not be owned by the organisation you work for
• not be a book, or an extract from a book.

We promise to keep your personal details confidential. We won’t reveal anything about you to our judges or to the organisation that produced the communication.

Prizes for this award

The winner of the Brainstrain award will be thrilled to win:

• the famous Brainstrain rubbish bin filled with sour worms
• the latest StyleWriter plain English editing software — single-user licence (from Editor Software)
• 2 hours free consultancy from Write Limited to start transforming the document or webpage into plain English
• a place on any of Write Limited’s 1-day open workshops to use before 31 March 2020.