Entering the Plain Language Awards — choose your category

The 2025 Awards categories. Which one(s) will you enter?!

You’ve got plenty to choose from

All 13 categories are open again for the 2025 Plain Language Awards. So there’s plenty of choice for plain language champions with the good stuff to share! Here’s a quick rundown of the categories.

Small but mighty — quick and easy to enter

Nothing is more powerful than a ‘before and after’ to highlight what plain language can do for people. So dazzle the judges with an unwieldy sentence, document, or webpage that you’ve transformed or turned into reading bliss for busy people.

These categories are the quickest and easiest to enter — but ‘oh so powerful’ with their content.

Best Plain Language Sentence Transformation

Best Plain Language Turnaround

Show us your docs! Annual reports, legal docs, and anything in between

Everyone reads your documents. You get results. People do the things they need to do easily. That’s because you create fit-for-purpose content that people can easily find and understand. Let everyone see this beauty — to see that it’s possible. Yes, even the legal stuff!

You’ll find categories to suit any document type.

Best Plain Language Document — Public Sector

Best Plain Language Document — Private Sector

Best Plain Language Annual Report

Best Plain Language Legal Document

Websites that don’t make people work

Worked wonders on a website that doesn’t make people work to find and understand info? If so, you’re the uncelebrated hero. Let us celebrate you!

Government organisation or private business, big or small — here are two categories to suit.

Best Plain Language Website — Public Sector

Best Plain Language Website — Private Sector

Technical communicators represent!

You’re the wrangler of complexity, the maker of clarity, the bringer of ‘aha!’ — the technical communicator. Thank goodness we have you!

Show the judges your best work — how you turn the technical and tricky into clear content.

Best Plain Language Technical Communicator

The premier category — for organisations and people championing plain language at work

If you, your team, or your organisation are leading the charge with championing a plain language culture at work, these are the categories for you.

You might be convincing your leadership team to adopt a plain language initiative, running workshops, or creating plain language projects. Or your organisation might be successfully embracing a plain language ethos that meets business and client needs.

Here are your categories.

Plain Language Champion — Best Organisation

Plain Language Champion — Best Individual or Team

The good, the bad, and the ugly — nominate a communication that stands out

Give a shout out to a document or website that was easy to read. Or call out one that strained your brain.

Even better, encourage people who may not know plain language is a thing to nominate. We all know when something is frustrating, unintelligible, or confusing! Likewise, when we find information easy to absorb and use.

The People’s Choice category is the only category open all year and has two awards.

Best Plain Language Communication

Worst Brainstrain Communication

Megan Bennett April 29th, 2025

Posted In: Communications

Plain language is all about people

We're all people trying to connect with other people | Image by Fauxels on pexels.com

We’re simply people communicating with other people

Plain language writers, creators, and designers can relate to this whakataukī (Māori proverb) beautifully!

He aha te mea nui o te ao? He tāngata, he tāngata, he tāngata!
What’s the most important thing in the world? It is people, it is people, it is people!

We’re all people trying to connect with other people. And when we use plain language, it shows we value that connection enough to care deeply about how we communicate and help other people.

Plain language matters to everyone — whether we know it or not

While we celebrate our work through the Plain Language Awards, others don’t know plain language is even a thing. They don’t know that life can be simpler if information is easy to find, understand, and use.

We all know people’s stories of frustration, hurt, uncertainty, and even harm that can come from unclear information. These stories come in many shades.

• A frazzled elderly person trying to pay for parking on a machine with confusing instructions
• A business owner with dyslexia who thinks it’s their fault they can’t understand how to tender for work on an unintelligible online portal
• A tired new mum working out how to dress their cesarean wound from wordy, unclear instructions in a hospital discharge letter

We also have the other side.

• A worker writing a standard operating procedure (SOP) that’d take someone 20 minutes before they found out how to deal with the toxin they’d just inhaled
• A school sending busy parents a newsletter about an upcoming school camp that mentions you need to have your child at school at 6.45am — on page 5
• A business owner throwing every bit of info they can at their clients, hoping that’ll seal the deal

We help people value how they connect with others

Then there’s us — the writers, designers, creators, learning developers, and user-testers — connecting people and proving the value in doing so. Digging into empathy, backflipping into people’s worlds to understand their needs, and convincing others to convey their information in the most helpful way they can.

People creating connection, clarity, and confidence by being courteous. People helping people to understand the value in caring for and valuing other people.

He aha te mea nui o te ao? He tāngata, he tāngata, he tāngata!

We’re all in this together.

Meet the team behind the Plain Language Awards

Make a nomination for the People’s Choice category

Megan Bennett April 16th, 2025

Posted In: Communications