Your chance to change the way
New Zealand communicates!

You can make a difference! Help us celebrate a really good document or webpage. Or let us know about a really bad one. Send in your nominations now.

The People’s Choice category has two awards:

• Best Plain Language Communication
• Worst Brainstrain Communication

Nominations for this category are open all year round.

The next Awards will be held in 2025, but send in your nominations now and we’ll hold on to them till then!

Please email enquiries@plainlanguageawards.org.nz if you have any questions. 

Worst Brainstrain Communication

This award reveals, in good humour, the document or webpage most notable for confusing and dumbfounding its target audience with obscurity and gobbledygook.

By putting these confusing documents and webpages under the spotlight, we hope that the organisations responsible will rewrite them in beautifully plain language.

Have you read something lately that strained your brain? Nominate it!

Read our blog on letting the People’s Choice be your voice

What you need to know

The ideal entry for the Brainstrain award is a publicly available or widely used document or webpage that causes problems for many people.

Documents or webpages nominated in either of the People’s Choice categories must:

• be whole documents or webpages, not extracts
• be in current use for business purposes
• be owned by an organisation that operates in New Zealand
• not be owned by the organisation you work for
• not be a book, or an extract from a book.

We promise to keep your personal details confidential. We won’t reveal anything about you to our judges or to the organisation that produced the communication.

Prizes for this award

The winner of the Brainstrain award will be thrilled to win:

• the famous Brainstrain rubbish bin filled with sour worms
• the latest StyleWriter plain English editing software — single-user licence (from Editor Software)
• 2 hours of free consultancy from Write Limited to start transforming the document or webpage into plain language
• a place on any of Write Limited’s 1-day open workshops.

Nominations for this category are open all year round.

The next Awards will be held in 2025, but send in your nominations now and we’ll hold on to them till then!

Please email enquiries@plainlanguageawards.org.nz if you have any questions.