The Plain Language Movement holds regular conferences on eliminating overly complex language from academic, legal and other circles. Like the Slow Food or conservation movements, it relies on drawing good examples from small-scale use all over the world, and sharing them with others. And like those, Plain Language has a decidedly political character with implications for democracy.
The movement opposes writer-based prose, the tendency to impress by being more formal as a way to acquire authority and power, believing that this improves credibility. Key figures of the movement hold that this is not so.
William Lutz, who teaches at Rutgers University and writes on doublespeak, and is referred to as the "George Orwell of plain language", asserts that "language is power, period. The lesson of Nineteen Eighty-Four is that those who rule the language, rule... The language of the lawyers, of the politicians, of the intelligentsia, is supposed to make [others] feel inferior." He cites also the inability of Three Mile Island and Challenger decision makers to comprehend warnings in vague engineering jargon using odd acronyms.
The movement advocates using personal pronouns and the active voice in all writing. The Canadian government is undergoing a pilot project to rewrite some legislation, on the theory that only good examples, copied, are likely to read to good plain language writing.
The Wikipedia has a Simple English version designed to facilitate good writing in plain language. However, it has not as yet received much attention. See [1].
