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December 05, 2005
Judy Foreman
The Los Angeles Times

We are drowning today in medical information  and, by and large, that's a wonderful thing.

Only a few decades ago, it was considered radical when a bunch of Boston feminists dug out the kind of information we feel entitled to today and published the first &lqt;Our Bodies, Ourselves,&lqt; a nitty-gritty, user-friendly medical guide for women. Now, 62.6 million Americans mine the Internet for medical information. Or, viewed another way, among Americans who use the Internet, 37% are looking for health material.

From August 2004 to August 2005, visits to medical websites grew a whopping 23%, according to ComScore Media Metrix, an Internet audience measurement company based in Reston, Va.

With such a surfeit, the challenge these days is finding trustworthy medical information amid all the profit-driven, misleading or just plain erroneous stuff on the Web. So here are some sites with carefully vetted, understandable information:

The government actually does a wonderful job on medical websites. The best by far for researching any disease  and the only site you really need if you're trying to get the basics in a few hours  is http://www.nih.gov, run by the National Institutes of Health. From the main site, you can get reasonably detailed information on many diseases, plus links to other government sites such as http://www.clinicaltrials.gov, which lets you plug in a disease and state and get information on studies you can join.

Other good government sites for researching diseases and finding general health information are http://www.medlineplus.gov, which is run by the NIH and the National Library of Medicine; http://www.healthfinder.gov, put together by the Department of Health and Human Services; and http://www.cancer.gov, run by the National Cancer Institute. A more esoteric site that requires some heavy slogging is http://www.ahrq.gov, run by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, part of HHS; it's not user-friendly, but has excellent reviews of research on selected topics. ...

If it's drug information you're hunting, skip the Food and Drug Administration's site (it can be difficult to navigate), and go to http://www.PDRhealth.com. The site gives consumer-friendly information based on FDA-approved information from the Physicians Desk Reference, the doctors bible of drug information. Or try http://www.safemedication.com, run by the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists.

From: www.latimes.com/technology/la-he-newsites5dec05,1,5295911.column?ctrack=1&cset=true
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November 19, 2005
The Advocate and WBRZ News 2 Louisiana
2theadvocate.com (Baton Rouge, Louisiana)

The recovery effort in the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita has brought a profusion of committees, numerous government initiatives and a veritable cottage industry of post-disaster journalism.

And where there are committees, government and reportage on the fly, there inevitably will be a lot of bad prose.

Even before Katrina came ashore, the storm clouds of bureaucratic jargon were looming on the horizon, as evidenced by such phrases as &lqt;prepositioning of strategic assets.&lqt; Apparently, no one admits to moving in supplies anymore. Instead, they preposition assets.

We also have noted -- alas, even in this very editorial column -- a post-Katrina glut of that already-overused phrase, &lqt;on the ground.&lqt;

People do not merely assess the situation in New Orleans; they assess the situation &lqt;on the ground&lqt; in New Orleans.

Agencies do not boast of having a presence in the recovery region; they remark with pride that they have a presence &lqt;on the ground&lqt; on the Gulf Coast. ...

With this in mind, we were heartened to learn that the Fifth Annual Plain Language Conference recently concluded its meeting in Washington.

The conference gathers people who are working to replace bloated language in our daily lives with cleaner, simpler writing.

Some of us will smile a bit at the thought of a Plain Language Conference in Washington, D.C., the epicenter of gasbag verbosity. A bit like having a symposium on chastity in the French Quarter, isn't it?

But let us be fair and note that many of the conference organizers hail from the federal government, where exposure to obtuse writing has made them yearn for something better. One of the speakers at the conference was John Strylowski of the U.S. Department of the Interior, who has been fighting for plain language for years.

&lqt;Rule No. 1 is that language should fit the user's needs, not the writer's,&lqt; Strylowski told his conference audience. &lqt;Nobody has ever read a sentence and said, 'Can you make this longer and more complicated for me?'&lqt; ...

From: www.2theadvocate.com/stories/111905/opi_edi001.shtml
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November 16, 2005
Elissa Gootman
The New York Times

When Susan Jane Gilman's parents picked up a hitchhiker years ago because he was wearing a Stuyvesant High School T-shirt, they were rewarded with this advice for their Stuyvesant-bound daughter: &lqt;Tell her to take Frank McCourt's creative writing class.&lqt;

And so Ms. Gilman became one of thousands of New York City public school students who, over the years, came to know Frank McCourt not as the Frank McCourt, of &lqt;Angela's Ashes&lqt; and the Pulitzer Prize, but as Mr. McCourt (&lqt;Frank&lqt; only behind his back) of Classroom 205.

Long before Mr. McCourt became a literary figure, he was somebody's high school English teacher. In his new memoir, &lqt;Teacher Man,&lqt; published by Scribner, Mr. McCourt recalls the successes (asserting control by eating a bologna sandwich hurled across the classroom, or introducing students to literary criticism through nursery rhymes) and travails (patronizing supervisors, grading fatigue and parent-teacher conferences) of three decades in the city's public schools. ...

Monday evening, some of Mr. McCourt's students - among them professors, lawyers, entrepreneurs and quite a few writers - gathered at Stuyvesant, in Lower Manhattan, for a reading by Mr. McCourt at a school fund-raiser ($60 a person for admission, hors d'oeuvres and a signed book).

There was Edward Newman, 41, who said that as an assistant United States attorney he thinks daily of Mr. McCourt's calls for simple, clear language. ...

Full Story: www.nytimes.com/2005/11/16/nyregion/16mccourt.html
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November 16, 2005

BusinessWire

California's new plain-English jury instructions are preferred by three out of four potential jurors, according to a survey by the official publisher LexisNexis U.S., a leading provider of legal, news and business information services.

In an online survey conducted Oct. 26-Nov. 3, California residents 18 and older found the new jury instructions are easier to understand, contain more familiar language and are overwhelmingly preferred to the instructions previously in use for 70 years.

As official publisher, LexisNexis shipped copies of the new criminal jury instructions (CALCRIM) to attorneys in early November. The new instructions are already being adopted by courts across the state.

&lqt;For centuries attorneys and judges have hid behind an impenetrable wall of words,&lqt; said William Burton, founder of the Burton Awards for Legal Achievement, a non-profit program that recognizes attorneys and law students who write with plain, clear and precise language. &lqt;The Judicial Council of California is to be commended for taking down that wall and making the legal process much more accessible to some of the most critical participants in a trial -- the jury.&lqt;

&lqt;The results of this survey show that it is possible to engage regular people in the law once you remove the barriers of stilted, archaic legalese,&lqt; Burton added.

During the survey, potential jurors were asked to read compatible phrases from the old and new jury instructions and rate how easy they were to understand and if they contained familiar language. For example, &lqt;Innocent misrecollection is not uncommon,&lqt; taken from the old instructions, was easily understood by 32 percent of respondents, while the new phrase, &lqt;People sometimes honestly forget things or make mistakes about what they remember,&lqt; was easily understood by 70 percent of respondents and preferred over the other example by 87 percent.

Similarly, this original jury instruction, &lqt;The law does not undertake to measure in units of time the length of the period during which the thought must be pondered before it can ripen into an intent to kill which is truly deliberate and premeditated,&lqt; was ranked easy to understand by 28 percent of respondents, while 13 percent said they didn't understand it at all. The new phrase, &lqt;The length of time the person spends considering whether to kill does not alone determine whether the killing is deliberate and premeditated,&lqt; was completely understood by 51 percent, while only two percent said they couldn't comprehend it. The new jury instruction was preferred by 89 percent of potential jurors. ...

From: home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20051116005501&newsLang=en
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