Janet Basdell – Founder and Director
Janet is a highly experienced technical author. Before starting Plain Words she was involved in all aspects of documentation production as an author, editor, translator and documentation manager. She has been a Fellow of the Institute of Scientific and Technical Communicators since 1998.
She explains how Plain Words was named and describes the focus behind the company.
“The company was named after Ernest Gowers’ classic book The Complete Plain Words, Amazon.co.uk (first published 1948).
The book was written as part of a Civil Service campaign to improve the clarity, precision, and brevity of official English. It’s a wonderful guide to how to write plain English.
I very much felt that what Gowers was saying is even more relevant in today’s world – especially considering the sheer quantity of information that is available with computer networks and the Internet.
One of the things he said was ‘To be clear is professional; not to be clear is unprofessional.’
So the driving force at the heart of Plain Words is to provide companies and organisations with documentation solutions that are not only clear and eminently usable, but that add real value to a company’s products and services.”
