 This afternoon's session is plain language for greater legal services delivery. And our guest speaker this afternoon is Anna Steele. She's a senior consultant at Just Tech LLC. And as part of Just Tech's Boston team, Anna's working with New England based clients to develop and implement strategic technologies that are in line with their unique needs. Anna got her start in legal services technology and legal assistance of Western New York. Where she assisted in administration of a variety of innovative technologies related initiatives including LSE TIG funding projects. Anna continues to work with law in New York on a part-time basis as a technology coordinator for special projects. Okay, I'll let you take it away from here, Anna. Great, thanks so much Miguel and hello everybody. So today I'm going to be talking about plain language and how we need to think about that in our legal services delivery. Quick note point of information. I am working from home and my dog just had surgery so she's feeling a little bit irritable. So sorry if you hear any barking. So as Miguel said, my name is Anna Steele. I'm a senior consultant with Just Tech. Just Tech is a technology consulting company that provides services in the technology space to primarily to legal services providers. Our team is made up of mostly former legal aid folks or folks who work in nonprofits. So we have a really great team of people to help legal services organizations with some of their technology needs. Prior to that, I was a technology coordinator at Legal Assistance of Western New York and then a little bit, I guess, about my background. So I graduated with a degree in international relations and then became an AmeriCorps VISTA at Legal Assistance of Western New York helping them with veterans work, thinking that I wanted to go to law school. I quickly realized that law school wasn't necessarily for me but loved the community and the mission of legal aid and wanted to stay involved. And fortunately, I was able to do that through my interest and love of technology and kind of marrying the two. So the mission of Legal Aid with the use of technology to spread access to justice and it's been a really, really great, really great opportunity, really awesome community. So I'm excited for all of you to begin your fellowships in your various programs. It's a lot of complicated, right? And there's really no denying that it's full of extremely complex terms and full jargons. As attorneys working in Legal Aid with low income clients, it's really, really important to present legal information in an easy to understand manner. Whether you're writing a letter to a client or developing post materials or offering legal information content for your organization's website, it's something that you really need to be thinking about pretty regularly. So the average reader reads between a fifth and eighth grade reading level, won't carefully read a document longer than one page and will give up on a document that is confusingly formatted, right? I don't think there's necessarily any surprises here as, you know, no matter what the reading level and no matter what the education level, you want to be able to keep your interest, right? I think that we've seen that in the way that we get our news so that, and absorb other information, right? So this really isn't something that's specific to low income folks or folks with lower education levels. It's really just kind of an important way to think about things in general, right? So if the average reader can't read your work, who are you writing it for, right? If they can't understand what you've written or don't read it because it's too long or it looks too complicated, why are we spending the time writing it? Well, for the most part, right, we're writing it because people are under the impression that having information available is better than having nothing there at all. But that may not necessarily be the case with legal information, right? As I mentioned and will mention throughout, the complexity of this, of a lot of the information out there really can hinder the access to justice push. So again, right, I'm gonna start off by focusing on sign language. So this is a cartoon from XKCD. It is his UpGoer 5 and he is explaining what this UpGoer 5 is only using the 10 hundred words that people use the most often, right? So it becomes very, it's very interesting the way he explains, right, a rocket ship with the quote, unquote, 10 hundred words that people use most often, right? So this is what I like to show to kind of demonstrate plain language, right? Using plain language means writing in a way that ensures that readers understand the content quickly, easily and completely as possible, right? As a non-attorney myself, I find it to be incredibly important. We spend our entire academic careers being told to write into complex, these are both sentences with plain language. Now for the lead advocates, we have to suddenly put all of that on hold and forget about that and try to get our point across in the simplest way possible. I remember the first couple of letters that I wrote to my client as an American Revista and my supervisor's bringing them back to me, like this, you can't send this out, right? No one's gonna understand that. So remembering like simple sentences, short words, right? Kind of like Randall Monroe did here in the SKCD comic, limiting your language to only very, very common words. I know it can be tricky with the law, but it's definitely something that we want to do. So the Plain Language Writing Act was passed about, I think about 10 years ago, probably a little bit more now. And it is designed so that our regulatory system has to ensure that regulations are accessible, consistent written in plain language and easy to understand, right? So that's something that our government is pushing to do. Now, since the Plain Language Act has been passed, there's a series of websites available on plainlanguage.gov for the different aspects of our government that show their plain language websites and resources and it's not always, a lot of them haven't been updated, but at least the message is there and this is what is being pushed, right? So through the Plain Language Act, it's necessary for obtaining, using plain language in any documents that folks need to use to obtain federal government benefits. Their taxes are explained to the public how to comply with requirements of federal government administrators or enforcers, right? So the federal government has really done a decent job, not a perfect job, right, but a decent job of kind of pushing this mission. And we want to make sure that we're translating that into legal services, right, to make sure that the information that we're writing is accessible. So why, right, why is any of this important, right? It facilitates access to justice, again, the law, making the law accessible just continues to push folks to better understand what their rights are in certain issues, right? It's a limited English proficiency issue. Folks that are speaking English as a second language or a third language, it's going to be much easier for them to understand plain language and content that's written in a basic manner rather than more complex legal jargon, race and equality issue. Everybody should have the same access to the information regardless of their education level. It all comes down to, right, the course belongs to the people. And we've really, unfortunately, there's been this growing disconnect that the access is not for everyone, right? This whole idea of this concept that justice for all has been is slowly being pulled away because this information isn't accessible. So we aim to create replicable plain language forms, right? A lot of these forms can be designed in a way that aren't necessarily specific to laws or concepts within a specific jurisdiction, right? So we want to be able to create forms that can be used across different states, across different jurisdictions, like basic forms you can use in your office to help people indicate which language they speak, right? So we want to create innovative training for this, right? How can we best train folks on how to use utilized plain language? And frankly, we want to create experts in this area, and we want to make people excited about this concept. Before you kind of start, before you're sitting down to write content, right, whether it's legal information content for your website or it's a letter to a client, you want to think of this list, right? So who's your audience? Who are you writing to? Right, in many cases, low-income people, people who are in distress, people who are concerned for their well-being, right? What do you want to say? Do you want to just give them a basic letter describing their rights? Do you want to give them full-on, close-day materials that they're able to represent themselves in court with? Do you want to make sure that they have that information, right? So again, what are you writing in this document? Are you writing something completely new? Are you giving your reader the information that they need to know to decide if they want to attend a program or an activity? Are you trying to change people's behavior, right? So you want to make sure that you mention how even small changes can bring benefits that are important to your reader, right? Or is your document a how-to text? You want to be sure to include any background information that your reader may need in order to understand these instructions, right? So how will your reader use this document? Right, again, are they trying to follow your instructions on how to get to the court on time? Right, is it a quick reference tool? So is it a basic Know Your Rights documentation? Will your reader need to read the whole thing to get a thorough understanding of the subject? Or do you just want to highlight certain parts of it? Right, how do you organize the information? What does your reader need to know most? What is the main message or theme of your documentation? Deciding what information must be included and what can be left out, right? Then you want to think about this information and divide it into primary and secondary points so you are able to develop your language accordingly, right? Create a structure for your document. It will make it easy and enjoyable to use. Chronological order is most often the best way to do things, especially for step-by-step instructions. If people already know something about the subject and you're sharing new information, right, you want to start with that old information first and then introduce the new, right? Make sure they're familiar with what they need to be familiar with before kind of launching into a brand new concept. If you are describing something completely new, like I said, you want to make sure that you're getting into the basics before the really specific kind of application procedures or rules that you're trying to get people to focus on. So how should you present this information, right? To decide on your document's format, you're going to want to ask yourself if your audience has any special needs, right? Should your document be multilingual? Do you need to use larger print if you run a Will's clinic and you're writing to a lot of elderly folks, right? You want to kind of think about that in terms of the letters that you're authoring. Do you need to include drawings or pictures? Should it be in a pamphlet or booklet instead of just a one-page or on a website, right? So these, so kind of thinking about all of these things are really important as you're launching into the development of your document or the letter. So we're going to take a quick exercise here. This paragraph here is 62 words long. And so I want everybody to take a second and read this paragraph here. And I want you to come up with how to say exactly what is being said in this paragraph in a shorter sentence. I'll give you guys a minute or two to do that and go ahead and put it in the chat window when you are done with that. I'll give you guys a few minutes. Yeah, let's go to a webinar and drop it into the questions box and then we will publish it to all. Sorry, thanks, Fred. No problem. All right, we've got one in. All right, a couple more seconds. If there's anybody else who wants to put in an answer. All right. So this is an example from plainlanguage.gov that they gave a paragraph that's too complex, right? Very clearly, this is far too complex. And so the example that they gave for the less complex version of this, if it's under nine words, right, most night jobs would keep teenagers off the street, more night jobs would keep teenagers off the street. Right, that's a little bit, that's like very, very simplified, right? Most of you came back with ones that were examples that were slightly more complex than this one here. So, you know, it's important to note that you want to make sure that you are still covering all of the information, but simplicity is key. Again, a quick kind of checklist for what to kind of prepare yourself for when you're writing in plainlanguage to make sure that your documents are written in a way that are understandable by the greatest number of people, especially your clients, right? So, I'm just going to pause here for a second, let folks review that, and let me know if you have any questions or thoughts before kind of jumping into our next part here. A brief history of the plainlanguage movement and how it's kind of, how I've seen it through my eyes, I guess, in legal services. So, right after I started at Law New York, I worked with a gentleman named Jeff Hogue, he was my supervisor, the supervising attorney and technology coordinator at Law New York. He really was a huge advocate for plainlanguage and was instrumental in the development of a series of plainlanguage tools. I think you'll hear me talk about today right clearly and read clearly. Jeff did a variety of plainlanguage projects through LSC, the Legal Services Corporation, Technology Initiative Grant Funding, and over the past, oh, I'd say, eight or so years, the tools and resources that have been developed as a part of these grants have evolved fairly significantly. This has been definitely a group effort. There have been a lot of really great, really smart people involved in this. We have done a lot, Law New York has done a lot of work with transcend translations, it's out of California that specializes in translation services. Plainlanguage is a big part of what they do, so they've been instrumental in putting together a series of trainings, document resources. There's a website that, while still hasn't been updated in a while, still has a lot of relevant information called RightClearly.org. And on RightClearly.org, you can find a, as I mentioned earlier, resources that translate well from organization to organization or jurisdiction to jurisdiction. There's a significant number of plainlanguage resources upon that website that you can, that are free and available for everybody to use, that you can download and edit to meet the needs of your organization and your clients. Other folks who've been involved in the projects that I've been working on, I mentioned Rhea and Jeff, we have partnered with folks at Idaho Legal Aid Services to help build some of these tools that I'll talk about in a little bit. And we've also partnered with Urban Insight, specifically their kind of open-advocate division who helps with the development of statewide websites for illegal aid content. So we've had a really great support and one more, I think, person who I want to give a quick shout-out to. His name is Brad Reef. He was an intellectual property fellow at law in New York years and years ago who helped with the initial development of the RightClearly and ReadClearly tools that I'm going to talk about today. So to make plain language something that is a little bit easier for folks to achieve within the legal services community, we developed, law in New York helps in the development of the RightClearly and ReadClearly tools. RightClearly is a plain language offering tool. We wanted it to be free, we wanted it easy to use and convenient for folks to use. In its first iteration, it was a Google gadget that shows you how old this was. So it lived on RightClearly.org. You can go to RightClearly.org, put in your text, upload a document, or upload an AQJ interview file, and it would point out what was and was not plain language. And help you make better language decisions. Google gadgets has since then since then and we were working pretty hard to figure out another way to make this information available for folks in an easy user-friendly way that wouldn't necessarily interfere with your workflow. Having something that matches your workflow is key when we're talking about plain language and offering tools. So I know it can be risky, but we're going to give a live demo a shot here. Sometimes a number of factors can go into whether a live demo can be successful, so I'm going to give the shot. If we have trouble with it, I have some slides. Assuming folks can still see my screen here, we have up here Open Advocates page, Open Advocates RightClearly page. This gives you information about the RightClearly plain language offering tool. Like I said, our goal is easy to use, so all you need to do is click and drag the bookmark to your bookmarks toolbar and it's there. It's that simple, nothing to download, nothing to install, no processes to go through and permissions to accept or deny. Just drag and drop. So once you have that in your toolbar, you can look at any website that you are currently on. Here I am on a legal information website page from Long, New York. If I click the RightClearly button here, it runs and it tells me what the grade level is of this article here. It will then go through and highlight, in this case, 77 different places where it has suggestions. The general suggestion summary says I need to shorten some long sentences, replace some complex words, a simple alternative to use gender-neutral language, avoid underlines, caps, and avoid underlines and caps. So as I move through this, it tells me, it highlights a sentence for me and tells me what words I may want to change. This says unexpected. I can tell it that I want to keep this word or to try a simpler word. If I click Try a Simpler Word, it'll give me some synonyms that may or may not be useful. This just queries a general dictionary at this point. So again, as you keep going through, it's telling me to shorten this sentence. It's again questioning the word utility, whether or not I want to keep the word or try a simpler word. If I were to, if I was doing this on a development environment or at work to go back and make changes and then re-upload this, if I run it again, nothing's going to change on this site because it's the same document, but if I run it again, it would tell me whether or not this or went up or down. So I ran two pages in a row. So this Keep This Word, Try Simpler Word function is something that we recently built in to try and make the tool a little bit smarter. It would be log which words people say should be kept in order to make the tool a little bit smarter and a little bit more useful. Well, I'll show you some examples of that here in a little bit. Again, very straightforward, very user-friendly, and easy to use on your own site. So try it out, definitely try it out. Be careful though. You can easily kind of get into a rabbit hole and start and spend the next half hour kind of checking a bunch of stuff or plain language, but it's important. It's important. So definitely try that out. Again, you can access that at openadvocate.org right clearly. This here is the list of words that I talked about. So all of these words, people said, Keep This Word. Don't get rid of this word. We like to use, or don't highlight this word as a problem word. And as you'll notice, some of them, particularly the ones in red, we decided as administrators on this project that we didn't want to get rid of those words. Termination, substantial reconsider, connotation, we believe actually are too complex if we're aiming to write between a fifth and eighth grade reading level. So we, the administrators on this have final say about what gets added and what's deleted from here. But I just wanted to kind of point this out as a method that we're using to make the tool more useful. So the next piece here is, I just wanted to highlight a change that we recently made to show folks, while this isn't necessarily a plain language issue, it still is a language issue for sure, to show folks the importance of using gender neutral language in the development of your website and content creation. So anytime that write clearly finds a place where you say his slash her or anything similar, it'll point out that you want to use gender neutral language, giving you tips on how to do that in a way that makes sense, many of which revolve around using singular versions of they and their, which are becoming definitely a more acceptable way to write in a way that makes people more comfortable rather than using gender specific language. The other new piece, which I will also do a live demo of is being incorporated right clearly into Google Drive. So if you're a Google Drive user, you can test your documents right there live in your Google Drive document. So here I've added the add-on from the Google Drive add-on shop, if you could call it, again, it's free. So if I show the write clearly toolbar, it comes up on the side. I can highlight the text that I want to talk about or that I want it to evaluate. I ask it to evaluate and it gives me the reading level and tells me suggestions. So for folks who either don't have a dev environment for their website or are writing letters or writing things live, you can still utilize the power of write clearly in the development of your materials. So that is write clearly. And one of the great parts of write clearly is that I mentioned to keep this word, use simpler words, things like that. This is a very organic project and we definitely want to continue to collect feedback from the community. So if you are using this tool, please let us know, please give us feedback. And also the more people who use it, the smarter the tool is going to be and the better it's going to ultimately be. So read clearly is the other tool that I wanted to discuss quickly. Now read clearly is a glossary. So again, we have the same goals as we did with write clearly as we wanted it to be free, easy to use and convenient. Again, this started as a side project and then was wrapped into a TIG, an LSE TIG grant, and was crowdsourced. There was a document that people put together of complex legal terms and their definition. And then this was supplemented by some online dictionaries. If you highlighted or hovered or clicked on a word on a webpage, a bar would pop up on the top and it would give you a definition. Now to show you this in action, I'm going to do another little demo here. And this one here. So this is the same article and you'll notice there's a purple box on the side. If the checkbox in there is checked, then that means that read clearly is currently activated. So you'll notice there are words with purple lines underneath it. That means it's a word in the read clearly dictionary. If I hover over that word, it gives me a definition. And again, to help allow the community to give us feedback, we have the thumbs up and the thumbs down thing. This is helpful and this is not very helpful. And again, we can take that data and make changes to our glossaries. We recently launched the Spanish component of our English glossary. So if I was to hit the Spanish button here, it would also give me that definition in Spanish. So a lot of our clients may be able to read really basic phrases, paragraphs in English if they're non-native English speakers, but they'll want a description of that term in their native language to make it a little bit easier. So we've recently implemented that. We've also implemented a test Spanish glossary, so that on websites that are made up of Spanish content, the glossary exists in full Spanish as well. So it works the same exact way. As the English glossary works, we have a series of words that were a mix of the crowdsourcing from the first time around, and then also words with the help of terms with the help of the folks over transcend translations, really building that glossary out. So we would love to expand the Spanish version and also love to expand into some other languages as well. So the new feature that has been recently launched with this is the ability to have custom glossaries. This is something that we've been getting requests for for a long time. However, it was technically complicated and would potentially be a support nightmare for the folks who are administering these tools. But it now exists. You can build custom glossaries. Some states wanted custom glossaries, but people wanted glossaries specific to different areas of the law. And now that is possible through GitHub. We have a GitHub repository. You could just submit a pull request with your new glossary. Objits from Urban Insight and I would review and approve the glossary, and then it would be available. Now to get read clearly on your website, it requires a little bit of backend work, but not anything more than adding a Google Analytics JavaScript snippet to your page. Same thing. Just a JavaScript snippet that you would add to the backend of your webpage. If you all are working for programs that use OpenAdvocate as their website or as a statewide website, then this comes built in. You can simply select the glossary that you would like to use for that webpage, and it's all built in right there. Again, if you guys are using OpenAdvocate. So taking things beyond the text, and I know you have had, you had another presentation on design this morning, so I won't get too, too much into this, but I just wanted to kind of talk about the importance of readability beyond just the words on the page. So you want to make sure, and again this applies more to website content development rather than writing a letter, but it still does apply, right? So you want to choose, hopefully I'm free to choose a choir here, but you want to choose a type that is clear and easy to read, pay attention to how the text looks on the page, you want left flush justification, and you want to use illustrations and graphics effectively. Again, so the clear and easy to read, you want to avoid excessive italics or a crazy font. Too many uppercase letters can also create problems for readability. So you want to really focus on fonts that are easy to read, and you can use bold to highly important information, you just don't want full kind of paragraphs of bolded text. You know, it's funny when I was making this slide, I had a flashback when I was in elementary school making like horrible PowerPoints with excessive clip art and like comic sans font and all of that particularness, and I couldn't help, couldn't help but laugh at myself a little bit. I was now giving a talk on how to do that in a way that was less ridiculous. So again, with the organized text piece, right where possible, you want to use bullets and short sentences to highlight the important pieces of it to make it more readable, utilizing like-based properly. And then effective use of graphics and illustrations. You want to use it in a way that allows folks to understand the text. You don't want to overdo it with the graphics. That's not going to be useful for anybody. You don't want to put graphics in the middle of text, right? You want to use it to complement it and placing it on the page in a way so your reader is not jumping around, but that they can read the information that you want to read, and it can be supplemented with the necessary graphics and illustrations. So here's an example of that. I know that... I'm sure this morning you heard a lot about Margaret Hagan and the legal design work that she does. So again, I don't want to get too, too repetitive here, but this is an example of something that was designed by folks at Law New York who still work in progress. It's not the final version, but through the foreclosure process in New York State. So again, much more effective than just a block of text on a web page. So we were really excited about this, and there's a variety of free and low-cost tools out there that can help in the development of info graphics, and easy to use and easy to read documentation. So I'm going to leave you with plain language goals from George Orwell's Politics and English Language. I think it's kind of a good summary of what I've talked about and something, again, as much as I want there to be more experts and more people who are also evangelizing in the importance of the plain language movement and legal services, I think it's just important at the end of the day that folks really think about it, really consider it, you know, as you become lawyers and supervisors and you're supervising legal work and you're passing on this information to others where it's really important. It's far more than just a language issue. It really is an access to justice issue, and it really is something that we all should be thinking about in our day-to-day work. So that is all I have. It's our formal presentation, but if anybody has any questions or comments or concerns, I'd love to hear them. So a lot of what you're suggesting here is very contradictory to how law students are taught to write. What is the best practical advice for them to really give this a try? How should they go about getting better at it as they work on projects? Is it just, right, clearly.org, the tool, or what else would you suggest for practicing? I would look for... There's a ton of exercises out there similar to the one that I put up on the screen that we did earlier. I think just even silly ones like that, it's not necessarily applicable to the law. It's not necessarily legal jargon that you're trying to cut out, but really kind of getting your head in that head space where you want to do that. So I think there's a lot of literature on it, reading up on it. I used to put a little sticky note on my computer that said plain language, so every time I was drafting something, granted I'm not a law student, but I would just remember to do that because it was ultimately very important. So seek out some exercises. Like clearly.org, like I said, does still exist. There is some stuff on there, but there's also a lot of great stuff on plainlanguage.gov and some of the other websites out there. Hey, Anna, what are some common documents that you can foresee fellows using plain language on over the summer with some of their technology projects? Well, it depends. I mean, it depends on what kind of technology projects folks are doing. What are some examples, just brief examples of some of the things that folks are working on, or thinking of working on? I believe some are working on document automation tools, existing content on different websites, some mobile apps. Is there some interest in video and multi-language production also? Yeah, I mean, all of those I think are really, plain language is really an important part of. So any sort of document automation you're doing, regardless of tool, whether you're using hot docs, ATJ out there, Neotoologic, any and all of that, you should definitely be putting your questions through a write-clearly or a similar tool, or have somebody you work with kind of read for plain language user test, user test, user test, user test. I cannot stress that enough how important it is to use user testing, find a client group to help you kind of analyze that and figure out whether or not you're on the right track. Even if it's not a client group, write somebody who is not in the legal space, that's the best place to start. If you're not doing any formal client-related user testing, someone who's not a lawyer, if you have undergraduate interns coming in, things like that. How do you put together that user testing portion? How does that go about? There's a couple of different ways you can do it. You can have formalized focus groups where you formally bring in folks and you run the focus group on the language. There's a series of different tools that you can put on your website to help you test what is being, where people are clicking, how they're using the website. Keeping track of your analytics tools isn't necessarily formalized user testing, but keeping track of your analytics tools in a way that allows you to see what articles people are reading versus not the duration of time that they're on a particular website. Are you seeing trends or people spending more time on websites with lower grade level to them? Probably, I would imagine so. There's all sorts of ways, both formal and informal ways to do user testing. Brian, you probably have some other ideas there too. I definitely agree that if you've got the time and the opportunity focus group testing is going to be the best, taking someone who is not familiar with the law at all, having them read it and let you know what it says or follow the directions works really well. The undergrad example or interns that have no connection with the law, because a lot of what you're looking at in that situation is we don't even realize that we're using legal jargon when we are because we're so used to it after being ingrained for several years. Yes, absolutely. Thanks, Brian. As far as the video production piece goes too, this is also very relevant in that. The spoken word, while not readability, you still want to have a sense of that the material is easy for folks to understand. If you're doing which I highly recommend you're doing, if you're doing any video content development, you should definitely be closed captioning them so that making sure that you can run your closed captions or your scripts through plain language tools and editors to make sure that that is the way that it should be. Same with if you're going to do subtitles making sure that they're presented in a way that is very easy to read and understand. Any other thoughts or questions? I guess one thing I do want to say, if anybody does have any thoughts or questions on plain language in general, on the Read Clearly or Write Clearly tools, or your projects in general, I'm a huge junkie for this stuff. I love, I love, love, love the connection between legal aid and technology. I'd love to hear from you guys, and I'm looking forward to hearing what you guys are working on and hearing about the final project and the fellowship program in general. Thank you, Anna. I really appreciate you taking the time out of today to come teach us about write clearly, read clearly, plain language tools. I believe your presentation was very practical, and we really appreciate it and look forward to staying connected with you over the summer. Yeah, thank you so much for coming in. I greatly appreciate it. I wish that more law schools would listen to this presentation and actually teach it as part of law school. Oh, I know. That would be amazing. Someday, maybe. Well, thanks again, guys, and thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.