Past Programs
Language and Linguistics - 2007
Neil James ... Plain English
11/07/2007
What do Shakespeare, Austen, Churchill and Martin Luther King have in common? According to Neil James, they all have a good handle on the merits of plain language, which is something that our workplaces and public institutions would benefit from.
Neil James is executive director of the Plain English Foundation, based in Sydney. You might have heard him recently on Radio National's Lingua Franca program, talking about the ethics of everyday language.
Neil James was a guest at this year's Sydney Writers' Festival, and that's where Catherine Freyne found him, to ask him about the relevance of Plain English principles to all kinds of expression, including poetry and literature.
She began by asking him about the origins of officialese.
