1. Talking about taxes in plain language A few considerations on principles for changes and evaluation procedures Karsten Pedersen Roskilde University, Denmark kape@ruc.dk 1

2. Case: Danish tax authorities Rewriting thousands of letters Evaluating the rewrites Karsten Pedersen2

3. Rewriting principles Shortening of sentences Simplifying sentence constructions Reversing (redesigning) content structure Karsten Pedersen3

4. Organisation Central language unit –Various educational backgrounds Decentralised language anchors or satellites Approvement procedure for larger mailings –1000 and more Karsten Pedersen4

5. Internal evaluation What do the colleagues think of the new letters –’They work, please let’s keep the old ones!’ Karsten Pedersen5

6. External evaluation 1 Quantitative evaluation of effect –E.g. telephonic reactions after letter Power relations may change with plain language –Qualitative evaluation of understanding Contrastive tests –Mixed evaluation procedures Karsten Pedersen6

7. External evaluation 2 No evaluation based on letter practices in the receiver group –Student project giving interesting indications No-readers=effort wasted? At least we need to review the options Karsten Pedersen7

8. Preliminary conclusions, further prospects It is not always a language problem Plain language cannot solve the no- reader problem Plain language can give more questions than before We need to find out how to anchor the project in the organisation Karsten Pedersen8

9. Thanks for listening Karsten Pedersen9