Judge: Best Plain Language Sentence Transformation

Director, WritersInc Ltd, Auckland, New Zealand

Ruth’s early life was spent in Yorkshire, where everyone spoke their mind, very plainly. Moving to Edinburgh at age 2, she found the Scots also spoke their mind, very plainly.

It was only when she started school in Birmingham that she had a problem. It wasn’t just her accent, it was the unusual vocabulary she had picked up. This sparked Ruth’s interest in languages. She studied French and English and qualified as a teacher.

In 1997, Ruth switched from teaching to technical writing. She enrolled in a Unitec paper and completed an Information Mapping Course.

In 1998, she established WritersInc, a technical writing company, and started cold calling. Thanks to the year 2000, it was easy to find clients. At this time, Ruth became a certified Information Mapping Trainer. Teaching people to structure a document and write clearly in plain English honed Ruth’s skills as a writer and as an evaluator of effective writing.

Meet the judges for the Plain Language Awards

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