Talking about taxes in plain language

A few considerations on principles for changes and evaluation

procedures

Karsten PedersenRoskilde University, Denmark

kape@ruc.dk1

Case: Danish tax authorities

• Rewriting thousands of letters

• Evaluating the rewrites

Karsten Pedersen 2

Rewriting principles

• Shortening of sentences

• Simplifying sentence constructions

• Reversing (redesigning) content structure

Karsten Pedersen 3

Organisation

• Central language unit– Various educational backgrounds

• Decentralised language anchors or satellites

• Approvement procedure for larger mailings– 1000 and more

Karsten Pedersen 4

Internal evaluation

• What do the colleagues think of the new letters– ’They work, please let’s keep the old

ones!’

Karsten Pedersen 5

External evaluation 1

• Quantitative evaluation of effect– E.g. telephonic reactions after letter

• Power relations may change with plain language

– Qualitative evaluation of understanding• Contrastive tests

– Mixed evaluation procedures

Karsten Pedersen 6

External evaluation 2

• No evaluation based on letter practices in the receiver group– Student project giving interesting

indications• No-readers=effort wasted?• At least we need to review the options

Karsten Pedersen 7

Preliminary conclusions, further prospects

• It is not always a language problem

• Plain language cannot solve the no-reader problem

• Plain language can give more questions than before

• We need to find out how to anchor the project in the organisation

Karsten Pedersen 8

Thanks for listening

Karsten Pedersen 9