Plain English approved by the Word Centre

If your documents and web pages are in plain English, why not tell everyone? You can be proud that you care enough about your customers to write to them in plain English. A good way to tell them about this is to get your communications accredited.

Our plain English approved logo shows everyone that your documents - paper or online - have reached the highest standards of clarity. This can encourage people to start reading your document - often the hardest thing to get them to do.

What do you need to do?

We need to see your documents before we can approve them. For a free opinion, you can email them to us or send us a link to them. If you prefer, you can mail them to us at: The Word Centre, 27 Norfolk Hill, Sheffield, S35 8QA, UK.

We'll let you know if they meet our standards. If they do, you can have the 'plain English approved' logo for a one-off fee of £250. This is the standard fee for one document. If you have several documents, we will quote you a lower rate for each one. Or you may find a logo season ticket is the best option.

For web sites we will look at your site and quote you a price based on the number of pages it has, or how many pages you want us to accredit. Just email us a link and we will get back to you as soon as possible.

If we think your documents need improving, we will tell you why, and give you an estimate for the work we need to do. You don't have to ask us to do the work, and you can re-submit the documents after working on them. For web sites - we know that webs sites are dynamic and constantly changing. So it would be unrealistic to expect you to ask us to edit your whole site, only for it to change again very quickly. We will expect you to show us that you have a 'plain English' policy for your site, and that your web writers have a good grasp of plain English principles (or that you are willing to train them). Often it helps if we edit a selection of the most important pages, to give your writers a lead.

If you want us to do the work, we won't start until you accept our estimate. Here is more information about our editing service.

Displaying the logo

Once you have our permission to use the logo, you can reproduce it in the colours shown above or in one colour, which has to be the darkest colour you're printing in. For example: you can print it in all black, all dark blue and so on. There are no limits on the size of the logo, but all the text must be easy to read.

If you would like more information about our 'plain English approved' logo, email us at df@wordcentre.co.uk.

Or phone 0114 257 1400 (from outside the UK +44 114 257 1400).

© The Word Centre 2012

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