How the WriteMark came to be

Here’s how New Zealand got its own, internationally recognised document quality mark — the WriteMark — as told by Lynda Harris. She is the Director of Write Limited, and she founded the WriteMark.

New Zealand had no objective standard for plain English

In 1999, awareness of plain English was growing. Many of our clients openly said they wrote in plain English. But we saw little plain English in the thousands of business documents that passed through our hands each year. How was a member of the public to know which companies really did believe in clear, honest communication?

I found myself saying that we needed a standard — something we could test documents against. This would eliminate a lot of the subjective comment on a document and reward 'real' plain English writers.

The UK had an objective standard

While roaming the web, I found the Plain English Campaign in the UK. I learned about their plain English mark — the Crystal Mark. It established a standard! It had gained huge public acceptance in the UK. It separated organisations who really cared about communicating clearly from those who gave plain English mere lip service.

I suggested that we become the New Zealand agent for the Crystal Mark.

Which other countries have plain English standards?

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The UK standard was rejected in NZ, so we made our own

Sadly, the Crystal Mark did not take off in New Zealand for two reasons. First, the UK-based fees were well outside what most New Zealand organisations were willing to pay. Second, many organisations said that it was a ‘UK thing’ — they didn’t want an imported quality mark.

So we decided to launch our own mark — we would call it called the WriteMark. Our goal was to have the WriteMark plain English standard recognised by the majority of New Zealanders.

We created and refined a New Zealand plain English standard

We decided to start from scratch and create a document accreditation scheme that was different to the other schemes we had heard of. We held focus groups and scoured international research into plain language. We created and refined the elements of the WriteMark standard, and established a training and moderation process for assessors. And we priced our fees as low as we could. We wanted to encourage all New Zealand organisations to invest in plain English.

We offered free WriteMark assessments to organisations who advertised a commitment to plain English. This allowed us to test and further refine our processes. And it showed organisations just how beneficial a standards-based assessment could be.
 

Launch day!

The WriteMark was officially launched on 1 March 2005 to strong media interest and great enthusiasm from early WriteMark clients.

The WriteMark document quality mark is now on a growing number of New Zealand documents and is well respected by practitioners in the international plain language community. The WriteMark criteria have been used to assess hundreds of documents and to audit writing quality across many large organisations.

Sponsoring the plain English awards

A year after creating a document quality standard, WriteMark Limited, with sister company Write, launched New Zealand's annual plain English awards. This was a not-for-profit activity that I and my colleagues became very passionate about.The WriteMark assessment criteria were used as the judging criteria in the first and second annual WriteMark Plain English Awards.

WriteMark Plain English Awards' website

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