Judge: Best Plain Language Website — Public Sector

Senior copywriter, Xero, Wellington, New Zealand

Beverley Stevens is a web writer and editor for the in-house agency at Xero, and an emerging writer of creative nonfiction essays.

From the technical to usable

The desire to make it easier for people to work efficiently led Bev to transition from managing IT systems, through user training and support, to writing documentation. She spent a dozen years as a contractor developing user guides, online help, and business manuals. Then the web came along. At that point, the medium and the tools changed, but the underlying principles — making information easy to find, easy to read, and easy to understand — still applied.

Still learning after all this time

Bev leads a small team of writers who are migrating website content with an eye to making it more usable, readable and accessible. She’s discovered that the practice of refining creative nonfiction pieces and of writing for the web feed into each other, whether it’s structuring content coherently, telling a succinct story, or crafting a clear sentence.

Meet the judges for the Plain Language Awards

How the judging process works