Read on Twitter
Summary of the above tweet chat. https://twitter.com/matt_westmore/status/1292050576826609666
Responses supporting both views were put forwards with the majority in the ‘we are rubbish at them camp’. More interestingly it generated some useful practical tips which I’ll summarise in this thread.
The first point made was that we are rubbish at them but that is mostly because it is much harder to do than you might think.
Think of it as a communications challenge – journalism’s maxim of the five Ws - ‘who, what, when, where and why’ - has served @SDenegri well
For the plain English summaries compared to technical, it’s more helpful to give more emphasis on why you are doing this, what difference it will make & how this will help you do that.
Ask for help. Get a colleague and a non-scientist to read it. Ask a teenager was a fantastic suggestion. A variation on that is to key points and then swap out language to write at a 10/11 year olds level and run it by a teacher friend to see if her class would get it
Picture your audience – visualise yourself presenting to them. It helps prevent slipping into the language your academic or clinical colleagues might use.
Watch out for average reading ages. The average reading age in the UK is 9. People working in research, including PPI, tend to have much higher reading ages than a general audience.
Some seemingly simple terms or concepts that we take for granted such as procedure, outcome, intervention are problematic. On their own these words aren’t bad (though be careful of av reading ages). Issue is that we use them to mean something particular rather than in general.
Other terms should be avoided such as ‘suffer’, ‘battle’, ‘subjects’, ‘empower’. Some of these are obvious to avoid others might only be obvious to the relevant patient communities – another reason to work with patients on writing the lay summary.
There are some useful tools out there. They won’t solve the problem on their own but help you along the way. There are a number of online readability guides (google em) and Plain English Campaign’s DrivelDefence http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/drivel-defence.html
We often think that using language that is too simplistic could be patronising but it turns out they normally don’t.
Randall Munroe’ Thing Explainer was flagged – perhaps taking things to the absurd (he used the 1000 most commonly used words to explain complicated stuff) but a great place to explore the world of extreme plan English https://www.amazon.co.uk/Thing-Explainer-Complicated-Stuff-Simple/dp/1473620910/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1Y6GX1EARY6TA&dchild=1&keywords=thing+explainer&qid=1596927323&sprefix=Thing+explainer%2Caps%2C146&sr=8-1
@slooterman explanation of the process of translating to plain language in the introduction to this essay collection https://docs.google.com/document/d/180BSG2IEZHNOPhp9uH7dG_N6YLe9eNvkeS_ry6tEZJ0/edit?usp=drivesdk
Who should ‘own’ the lay summary? The PI, the PPI group, PPI co-applicants. I clumsily said I didn’t think it should be ‘palmed off on the PPI group’. I was quite rightly challenged – would we consider stats a being ‘palmed off’ on statisticians?
I think we agreed that it is everyone’s responsibility but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a nominated lead.
A bit of contrary view… might seem like a good idea to get a PPI group or lead to write it but they can sometimes be too close to the topic as well and not representative of reading ages and research specific knowledge level of the wider community.
On whether It is too subjective, some did share some examples. Where the summary had been written by patients, patient groups, charities and even accredited experts in plain English – the result was still ‘it isn’t plain English enough’.
@rupert_pearse pointed out that it has become so important (at least for @NIHRresearch) that everyone takes a view. Perhaps we should leave it to the experts – the PPI members. That loops back to @lynn_laidlaw point about ownership above.
In summary I reflected 3 different issues. All get lumped into 'its not plain English enough or not written for a lay audience' but I think they are different.
Firstly, whether something is plain English is largely an objective technical issue of grammar (passive voice etc)
Secondly, whether it is understandable is partly objective and partly subjective its about semantics (obj) and audience (subj);
Finally the issue of understandable to whom is completely subjective. If patient X understands and patient Y does not is it right or wrong?
As ever the twitter PPI community has been fantastic. This thread was brought to you by @SDenegri @rupert_pearse @lynn_laidlaw @rachelBrnnan @evidentsumanth @Healthy_Control @elaniLChambers @ajcook @maryluadams @tracymce77 ...
...and @nicolacullum @janekohara @welshflier @amyfeltham @Stoppybrunette @KadoorieCentre @colourful_ot @Drakesyard @drdrsagar @citizen689
