Talking Human

Government language is really not related to everyday English. It is dense, uses terms nobody would use in a conversation and is riddled with acronyms. (Well I suppose it is hard to write out names like the Victorian Bushfire Reconstruction and Recovery Authority more than once.)

This is terrifying for more than one reason.

Nobody will understand what you are saying if you make it difficult

A great write-up of a study in Mind Hacks shows that we don’t trust information presented to us by someone speaking in an accent we find hard to understand. This effect is isolated from any prejudice and is related to how hard the information is to comprehend. In the same way,  we are less likely to believe information presented in a hard to read font or colour.

“We are less likely to believe something told to us in a foreign accent because the difficulty of adjusting to the voice unconsciously undermines the speaker’s credibility.”

Most of us find information difficult to comprehend in the first place

The good old Australian Bureau of Statistics did an Adult Literacy and Lifeskills Survey in 2006 that came out with some pretty scary results. A full 49% of Australians aged 15 to 74 don’t meet the minimum requirements for prose literacy. This is “the knowledge and skills needed to understand and use information from text including editorials, news stories, poems and fiction.”

Make information complex, and half the population won’t understand it, make information hard to comprehend, and the other half won’t trust it.

Governments are mostly communicating valuable messages, it is a sad waste if all that information doesn’t get through. Of course, some government work is communicated brilliantly – just think of any Quit or WorkSafe campaigns. That’s the kind of attitude that needs to find it’s way  to road closure notices or Centrelink forms.