” “The Admiral confided that the problems of trying to run an all-volunteer force were catching up with the U.S. Navy. All of its training manuals recently had to be rewritten for comprehension at a Grade 5 level.” “

The Royal Armed Forces of Great Britain has the same problem, as the Canadian Armed Forces of Canada does. Both countries don’t want to acknowledged the climbing low literacy rates, and nor do they want to acknowledged the complicated and hard to understand babble of documents/reports/manuals of government and its agencies on the readability of the government/technical/regulations material. At least the American government and the US Armed Forces who were the first to do something about it, starting in the 1950s, for reasons that will be outlined in the following links, the British and Canadian governments should follow suit, but it is highly doubtful that both governments will not follow suit. Its not part of their culture to write documents and manuals in plain language. As I learned today, The 1867 Constitution of Canada, plain language was not about to make its appearance when the political powers of the time rooted in British culture, was trying to leave the impression that Canada was a super world power.

I am not bothering to show the link, but I really had to give my head a good shake that the French translation written by one who was educated in England, loyalty to the king and the British crown - upper class babble - “Dominion of Canada as Puissance du Canada in the British North America Act.”  Suffice to say the French of Quebec were quite displeased, and probably this set of printed words marked the beginning of the separatist movement in Quebec. My point is words are powerful, and poorly written text can caused a multitude of unintended consequences for both the reader and governments.

1. The Principles of Readability - http://en.copian.ca/library/research/readab/readab.pdf

2. Wikipedia version - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readability

3. The ABCs of Plain Language - Working with Plain Language: A training manual
http://www.impact-information.com/Resources/working.pdf

Now back to the cultural bit about Canadian and British governments/armed forces who will not acknowledge the incomprehensible babble in their documents and manuals. Some on the web call it elitist - “My impression is that the RAF’s manual writers did have elitist attitude about “cartoons,” but it may not have been rational.”
http://forum.12oclockhigh.net/archive/index.php?t-32345.html  Quite a few of them on the web, either putting down the approaches of the Americans or calling the British style of writing training manuals - elitist and other disparaging terms. Otherwise, since the dawn of the 21st century, the plain language proponents of the English speaking countries except for Canada (I could not find any evidence) are winning the war or at least a few battles in government/armed forces in the use of plain language in documents/manuals.

No doubt the good admiral is put off by it, especially if he was to acknowledge that merry old England has a literacy problem and a lot of poor writers who can’t seem to write in the plain language style to make it comprehensible to one and all. One of the British web sites - http://www.clearest.co.uk/editorsoftware/plain-english/#benefit4  “Only one out of 50 business and government documents is in plain English. Why? Because untrained writers draft documents full of passive verbs, long sentences, wordy phrases, complex words and other style faults.”

And here - http://www.centreforliteracy.qc.ca/node/188
And here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_language

By coincidence, this very topic came up on the radio talk show in my province. Trying to understand the babble of government documents dealing with the new recycle fees at point of purchase for all electronic goods….....and example of the babble -  http://www.recyclemyelectronics.ca/nl/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/EPRA_Stewardship_Plan_NL_2013.pdf

Suffice to say, I was put off by the elitist pretension tones of Newman, and the silent refusal of not acknowledging the historical culture aspects that has contributed to the decline in literacy levels, than mocking other countries that have done something about it. The declining fortunes of the British Royal Navy, has more to do with the insistence of having the majority of candidates for officers having post-secondary education levels, that in the end, the training manuals of the British Royal Navy, remained at the grade 11 reading level and certainly not done in plain language.

The plain language advocates does have a very valid point – it is so much easier to read a document in plain language than it is to read the present wordy babble and sometimes incomprehensible to the best of the readers of the Canadian governments, its agencies and social institutes such as the public education system.

In North Carolina, the BMW company ran into similar problems on the production lines in their state of the art plant. The BMW’s ultimate work around normal written documentation was to produce look see picture books which could be readily understood by the bulk of employees..with no necessity to be able to read.