Training people to write for GOV.UK

Some 340 government organisations were bringing their content onto a single domain for the first time, meaning there would be duplication, conflicting information and a range of styles.

The aim of the single domain was to simplify users so that they wouldn’t have to understand and navigate the complexity of government to be able to complete their tasks.

Centralising the publishing into a single team was not viable due to the volume of content that needs to be put live on a daily basis, so the publishers would need to be trained in content design skills.

Crocstar was brought in to lead the content design training.

We designed a full-day training session on how to write for the web and use the GOV.UK style guide, incorporating understanding user needs and plain English.

The training course was a one-day session, delivered to people from a range of organisations, which allowed for peer learning as well as learning from the trainer.

The session was practical, with lots of exercises and opportunities to talk through issues.

Christine Cawthorne from Crocstar trained 2,500 people across the UK over 2 years.

We helped them to better understand user needs by slimming down their content and advocating the use of plain English.

We developed another bespoke course teaching people how to recognise and write in plain English, with particular focus on jargon, political language and legal language.

We combined it with a session on pair writing. This led to a new way for content designers to create content with subject matter experts, who could be averse to publishing content to GOV.UK style.

This led to Crocstar director Christine, in conjunction with US law professor Christopher Trudeau, publishing research on people’s preferences for plain language: The Public Speaks, Again: An International Study of Legal Communication

Christine also wrote several posts for the GDS blog during the project.