[Reading-hall-of-fame] Making Connections in Document Design

[tsticht at znet.com]

6/1/2015

Making Connections: From 1970’s Army Manuals to 2010’s U.S. Plain Writing
Act

Tom Sticht, International Consultant in Adult Education


>From 1967 to 1976, I directed R & D teams in a two-pronged approach to the
training and utilization of low literate military personnel. In one
approach, we looked at how the literacy skills of personnel might be
improved through literacy education. This approach led to methodologies for
developing contextualized and integrated job skills and basic skills
programs (Sticht, 1975a,b) . These methods were later used in the federal
government’s National Workplace Literacy Program and are included in the
Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), Title II: Adult Education
and Family Literacy Act of 2014.


The second approach to improve the utilization of low literate adults
involved modifying job reading materials to make them easier to learn from
and use in performing job tasks.  Our focus in this work was on ways that
jobs and job reading materials could be redesigned to make it easier for
lower ability personnel to enter into and progress in them while engaging
in additional education to increase their literacy skills. This led to the
development of a new readability formula for estimating the grade level of
difficulty of job-related technical manuals, forms, and other documents and
to methods for the design or redesign of documents as job aids to make them
easier to comprehend and use in work contexts (Sticht, 1975a). Later,  my R
& D team completed a Guidebook for the Development of Army Training
Literature (Kern, et al., 1975) which illustrated with numerous “before”
and “after” pages the uses of readability formulas and document design
methods to make documents easier to comprehend and use in the performance
of work tasks.


Based on the foregoing R & D, in the Fall of 1976 I was appointed Associate
Director of the National Institute of Education (NIE) in the U.S.
Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW). There I was once again
able to engage in the two-pronged approach to improving life circumstances
of low literate adults by funding research on adult literacy education and
by improving the readability and design of documents. The latter included
the issuance of a request for proposals for the initiation of a Document
Design Project for research on the improvement of functional reading
materials (e.g., forms, regulation's, manuals, brochures, etc.) through the
use of “plain language” and document design techniques. The winning proposal
included a consortium of the American Institutes for Research (AIR), the
Carnegie Mellon University, and Siegel & Gale, Inc., a firm specializing in
technical writing.


At AIR, the principal investigator was Dr. Janice C. “Ginny” Redish and with
her guidance AIR established the Document Design Center. The Carnegie Mellon
University instituted the Communications Design Center.  Over the years,
teams from the Document Design Project helped numerous government agencies
develop regulations and guidance calling for the use of plain language and
document design techniques. The Document Design Center disseminated
information about plain language and document design from 1979 to 1989 in a
newsletter called “Simply Stated” and reached some 18,000 readers 10 times a
year (Redish, 2000, p. 165).


In time, Presidents Carter and Clinton signed executive orders directing
that government agencies follow plain language and document design
principles. In 2010, the U. S. Congress passed Public Law 111-274 called
the “Plain Writing Act of 2010” which President Obama signed on October 13
of that year.



References (See addendum below)

Doak, C., Doak, L., & Root, J. (1985). Teaching patients with low literacy
skills. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott.

Kern, R., Sticht, T., Welty, D., & Hauke, R. (1975, November). Guidebook for
the development of Army training literature. HumRRO Tech Rep. No. 75–3. 
Alexandria, VA: Human Resources Research Organization.

Redish, J. (2000). What is information design? Technical Communication.
Second Quarter, 163-166.

Sticht, T. (Ed.). (1975a). Reading for working: A functional literacy
anthology. Alexandria, VA: Human Resources Research Organization.


Sticht, T. (1975b). A program of Army functional job reading training:
Development, implementation, and delivery systems. HumRRO Final Report:
FR-WD-CA-75b. Alexandria, VA: Human Resources Research Organization.

Addendum: Making Connections are brief notes on relationships among my work
and the work of others. In addition to the document design connections
discussed above, in 1981, Cecilia C. Doak from Patient Learning Associates,
Inc. (PLA) met with me at my office in Alexandria, VA. PLA was working on
health issues with low literate adults and we discussed the two-pronged
approach to addressing the needs of less literate adults mentioned above.
Later I sent PLA copies of Reading for Working: A Functional Literacy
Anthology and the Guidebook for the Development of Army Training
Literature. In 1985, PLA staff published a book entitled “Teaching Patients
with Low Literacy Skills” referencing these books (Doak, et al, 1985).  The
PLA work formed the foundation for much of today’s  field of health
literacy which largely follows the two-pronged approach of educating people
to improve their health literacy and the design or redesign of
health-related materials to make them more readable and useful to patients
and the general public.

tsticht at aznet.net