Judge: Best Plain English Document category

Director of Writing Center and Assistant Professor of Teaching, Georgetown University, US

David is the Director of the Writing Center and Assistant Professor of Teaching at Georgetown University. His current research focuses on how recent discoveries in the fields of usability and cognitive psychology call into question some traditional writing advice, such as delaying emphatic points, as in the once-beloved ‘periodic sentence’.

Before Georgetown, he taught writing at Wake Forest University and Columbia University, where he earned his PhD in English. Outside academia, he has taught writing to hundreds of employees from dozens of corporations, non-profits, and government agencies, including Kellogg, Fannie Mae, the Red Cross, and the EPA. As a Board member of the Center for Plain Language, David leads the Center’s Federal Report Card programme.

Plain English Awards judges