What a tangled website we weave

I've written favourably about the new gov.uk site before, and this week I see they've also published their style guide and content guidelines.

For comparison, here's the house style and plain English guide I helped write for my present employers. The Economist, Guardian and BBC style guides are also useful reference points, particularly for anyone coming in to an organisation that hasn't yet developed its own rules.

This latest addition is an impressive bit of work: most of it accords with what we're already doing in our publications, and while there a few points I would quibble with (they advise against writing out numbers below 10, for instance) there are certainly a few more we could incorporate (eg on SEO).

It would be nice to see this applied consistently across the whole public sector and its sub-guides; gov.uk could act as a sort of BSI for these (though I'm not sure what my pals at Hansard would make of that). If David Cameron's looking for a house style tsar, I hereby throw my hat into the ring.

Hearts and minds

Victoria Macdonald at Channel 4 News had a good blog post on jargon in healthcare communications yesterday. She suggests that the political challenge of reorganising the NHS might be a lot simpler for managers and civil servants, if only they communicated with a suspicious public in something nearer plain English:

"Those speaking for change did not argue their case particularly well and at times seemed either exasperated or even patronising. I know they did not mean to come across that way but years of reporting the NHS has shown me that often those working in the health service do not know how to speak plain English and regularly fall back on jargon as well as making assumptions that people and patients know as much as they do about complicated statistical models of health care."

As well as helping to win arguments like these, taking clear communication more seriously could save lives. The approach of a senior manager at one of my employers — "if you can't convince them, confuse them" — seems, sadly, just as common in the healthcare sector as everywhere else.