Plain Language Awards 2023

Three of our amazing team made it to Wellington’s Parliament Building yesterday evening for the 2023 Plain Language Awards. Our entry was awarded Plain Language Champion - Best Team. Our application can be viewed here.

We are delighted to have had the opportunity, through our Plain Language Awards application, of highlighting the importance of communication accessibility. How documents are written and how people talk can make a huge difference in others’ lives. We hope our application has explained why accessible communication is important, and demonstrated ways that communication can be improved.  

We are a team of speech-language therapists. All our work at Talking Trouble Aotearoa NZ is about making communication easier for children, young people and adults. We aim to make spoken language and written language easier to understand, and we help people have their say about the things that are important to them. 

The stakes are high in the contexts where our team works. We work in courts, prisons, care and protection settings, schools, health settings and police contexts. The communication involved is often confusing for many people: for example, the words that are used, the processes that need to be understood, and the documents that need to be read. We are trying to change the communication in these contexts so it makes sense to people. Our work is about making sure people can meaningfully take part in whatever it is they need to do in their lives. We work with individuals who may need to deal with professionals and the law for a wide range of reasons. Our role is to make sure that communication (spoken and written) works well. That involves us working with professionals like judges, lawyers, police officers, and social workers to make sure people can understand what is going on and express their views. We also deliver training and develop resources to bring about change across whole systems, aiming to make communication easier for everyone. We are passionate about this work and want to make sure that everyone knows about our profession of speech-language therapy - it is an incredible career option. We want to ensure that the expertise of a speech-language therapist is available to all who may need us.