Introduction

Plain English, that is the use of ordinary everyday English in official documents, is not an innovation of recent decades. There have been repeated pleas for it down the centuries (see, for example, Sir John Cheke, 1557) and even more recently in well-known works such as Sir Ernest Gowers' Complete Plain Words (1954). The current drive for Plain English, however, dates from the 1970s and has its mainspring in the consumer movement. The recognition that consumers had rights and were not just a source of income for manufacturers and sellers not only led to better products but also eventually spread to aspects of language used in the documents which described products and services. Indeed, one of the first plain English documents came from a market survey conducted by Sentry Insurance in 1974. Responding to the consumer movement, the Company sought to discover the desires of its customers for insurance. One request, unexpected by the Company, kept emerging: the desire for a comprehensible policy. The Sentry Insurance car policy and the Citibank loan agreements which appeared in early 1975 are generally recognised as the first manifestations of the current plain English movement.

Australia was not far behind these developments in the United States.