Writing Assignment
Project 1a you are going to consider websites for the ClearMark Awards and
for Project 1b you are going to grade a federal website using the “Writing
Quality” portion of the Center for Plain Language 2019 Report Card Grading
Criteria.
Project 1a: Find a website and judge it according to the ClearMark Award criteria. I recommend (but do not require) that you find a local government website that users would visit in order to find information about city services or council meetings or whatnot. This can be challenging, because even though local websites are likely smaller overall (compared to a federal website) there can still be page after page of content. Therefore, you will need an approach to rendering your judgments. Here are three options:
• Evaluate the entire website based on the ClearMark Award Judging Criteria.
• Propose and execute a plan of evaluation in which you look at only certain pages and score them using the ClearMark Award Judging Criteria.
• Compare and contrast more than one website and determine which one scores higher using the ClearMark Award Judging Criteria.
There may be other strategies for Project 1a, and you are welcome to propose one to me, but whatever approach you use, you must show your work. In other words, I should be able to read the Project 1a report and see the evidence that you used to come up with your scores. Screen captures would be very helpful. Also, “local” does not need to mean Houston or any of the massive and sprawling suburbs with tens of thousands of residents. You can use a city webpage for a very remote location if you so choose. Project 1b: Choose a federal website and grade it for “Writing Quality” according to 2019 Report Card Grading Criteria. Again, you will need a plan. You could look at the homepage and the most frequently visited page (if you are able to determine that - you may need to surmise). Show your work. If you award a high or low score on “Understanding audience needs” or “Style or voice” or “Structure and content” show the evidence. If it helps, you can use the ClearMark Award rubric to help you come up with your scores.
What is the Federal Report Card? Let’s back up a little. If you watched Annetta Cheek’s presentation, titled “The U.S. Plain Writing Act: Ensuring the Citizens’ Right to Clarity” (2014), you know that when the Plain Language Act of 2010 was passed there was no mechanism to hold government agencies accountable if they did not comply with the act. The people involved at the time worked around this problem by coming up with a grading system. They would grade the agencies and their compliance with the law and the writing, and then they would publicize the grades in the press. Both were really smart moves to overcome an intractable problem. Everyone understands A-F grading and no one wants to see their agency reported in the press for having received a failing grade on this new thing called the Federal Report Card. Viewed from the other perspective, agencies that score well, of course, want to see their good work acknowledge. The press release almost writes itself. What you need to do now is become familiar with the Center for Plain Language Federal Report Card website and resources. This is a little tricky because there is a lot of content. That is a good thing for the federal government but it may make your assignment a little more challenging. Anyhow, to begin, spend some time clicking around so you get comfortable knowing what is where and read everything to learn how the grading system works. It may be helpful to you to look at the scores from previous report cards beginning with 2012 and advancing up to last year. Look for the changes in grading and the explanations of those changes from year to year as volunteer graders at the Center for Plain Language learned how to grade the agency websites and made small adjustments. You can also look at individual agency scores across times. Some are quite consistent, either for good or bad. Here are links to the old report
cards: 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 The 2019 page is the most robust and evidence, perhaps, that the PL grading system is working. For all of the years you will find two scores, compliance (“Organizational Compliance”) and writing (“Writing Quality”). My understanding is that compliance is a simple matter of the agency or department complying with the law (hiring people to do PL) and complying with the PL graders by answering emails and supplying information when they had questions or asked for assistance. Some agencies or departments hired and responded and supplied quickly while others did not – looking at you, Ben Carson, and your Department of Housing and Urban Development. After you spend some time on the website, watch one or both video lectures by the guy in charge of the grading, David Lipscomb. The two presentations are largely the same. If you look back at my comments on the Plain Language
Summit 2018 presentations, I stated that the speaker (Lipscomb) was “rough.” He has not appreciably improved as a speaker since 2018, but he does explain the grading process and the inherent challenges in the 2019 presentations. Here is the July 22, 2019 presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_zTZGDE7Gg&list=PLd9b- GuOJ3nHMlmPFMw8cJxN_DW-odj0J&index=1
Here is the September 9, 2019 presentation: https://digital.gov/event/2019/09/05/plain-language-summit-2019/. Interestingly, during the question and answer session after his September presentation he is somewhat confronted by those who were on the receiving end of his grades. They sound a bit perturbed at the lack of transparency in the grading process.
How are the federal websites graded? How the federal websites are scored, that is, how points are rewarded or deducted, remains a mystery, but at least we know what pages in particular were scored in 2019: the homepage and the most visited page. The decision to only grade those pages knocked a project that is overwhelming in scope down to doable. We also know the grading criteria for 2019 used for the Federal Report Card. For various reasons, I suspect that the scoring rubric used for the Federal Report Card is the same one used for the ClearMark Awards, which is also sponsored by Center for Plain Language to “recognize the plain language communications created by North American organizations.” That grading rubric is at the bottom of the page here: https://centerforplainlanguage.org/awards/clearmark/criteria/ Are you still with me? Good, because for Project 1a you are going to consider websites for the ClearMark Awards and for Project 1b you are going to grade a federal website using the “Writing Quality” portion of the Center for Plain Language 2019 Report Card Grading Criteria.