So said the leaflet that has dropped through every door in the United Kingdom.
At my last ever literacy volunteering session in Birmingham (at the wonderful Brasshouse Language Learning Centre, with the tutor Nerys and all the adult literacy students), we went through this oh-so-important leaflet, and came up with stumbling blocks all over the place! Why would you use words like “pandemic”, “strain”, or “respiratory” in a leaflet meant for everyone to read?
As a small tribute to all the students I’ve worked with over the past two years, I’ve tried to make a more readable version. The production values are lower, it’s a bit shorter, but it’s pretty simple to read and understand (I hope!). Download the PDF here.
I will be translating the Animal Testing paper at some point in the next two weeks — I’m moving to London to start a new job, so it will take a while to get settled in and find a reliable internet connection! Thanks for your patience, and keep reading and commenting.
Corinne Pritchard
Latest posts by Corinne Pritchard (see all)
- Linked — 5 September 2016
- Designing a fashion website — 26 October 2014
- Service design conference — 9 October 2014
Nice one :)
Lovely. Reading your leaflet made me want to giggle. :D
It wasn’t intentionally funny… :P
Corinne,You have done a great job. However, there are times when it is useful to explain technical words. A headline today reads “WHO considers declaring swine flu pandemic”, and I think there are going to be many more like this. The flu leaflet would be more useful if it explained briefly what a pandemic is (and perhaps the role of the World Health Organisation).
I love it. There needs to be more stuuf like this: In between the wordless picture books, and the OMFGJARGONZ.
CorinneI think your simplified leaflet could be very useful for E1-E2 adult literacy/ESOL students and have said so on my Blog.I also agree with Michael’s comment — there’s nothing wrong with using technical language especially when it is an easy-to-read (decode) word such as pandemic.I look forward to exploring more of your site and sharing more of your simplified texts with my students.Thank you
That’s excellent! :)
Fantastic translation; I agree that explaining words that are going to come up again and again in radio and TV reports (such as ‘pandemic’) could be useful.Also please note ‘a illness’ on page 2 should be fixed to read ‘an’…
You are wonderful. This is wonderful. Thanks.