Administrator's Plain Language Award
What is Plain Language?
In a plain language document, readers can
- find what they need
- understand what they find
- use what they find to meet their needs
Why use Plain Language?
- Plain language saves your reader time.
- Plain language saves you time because you don't get a lot of questions about your documents.
- Plain language gets better results because readers understand you.
What do FAA's customers think about our writing?
In 1999, during a survey of the government's customers, the National Quality Research Center of the University of Michigan interviewed a random sample of U.S. commercial pilots. The pilots said our standards and regulations were very unclear, and didn't contribute to air safety. Here's the total survey results. We followed up with focus groups of commercial
pilots, mechanics, and general aviation pilots. They all said the same thing! They can't understand what we write. That's startling information! We need to do better.
Read about FAA's Plain Language Program.
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