That's according to Candice Burt, partner at Simplified, a plain-language training and consulting firm. She says that the new Act obliges companies to communicate with consumers in a way that is fair and easy to understand.
The Act affects business communications at many levels, from consumer contracts and agreements through to marketing and advertising. Most businesses will need to change the way that they speak to their customers to meet the requirements of the Act.
The Act, signed into law on 24 April, comes into effect in stages. By 24 April 2010, the National Consumer Commission must be established and the regulations will come into operation. Six months later, the rest of the Act will come into effect.
“This means that the time is ripe for those businesses that have yet to start implementing plain language in their customer communications to do so now so that they do not need to scramble to comply when the law comes into effect,” says Frances Gordon, director at Simplified.
“Something that businesses must bear in mind is that plain language is a discipline in its own right. It is not something that a copywriter or a lawyer can do, without proper training. The complexity of introducing plain language should not be underestimated - it involves fundamental changes to how a business and its employees communicate.”
Among its other goals, the Act aims to protect consumers against unfair business practices, increase fairness, promote equality among consumers, and give consumers the information they need to make good decisions.
To meet these aims, the new Act makes plain language a fundamental consumer right and a legal obligation on companies. For example, the Act states that all agreements for consumers must be in plain language and set out an itemised breakdown of the consumer's financial obligations under the agreement.
“Because plain language is a fundamental right, it cannot be contracted out of. This means that documents must be in plain language, regardless of whether the customer has stated that they understand it or not,” says Burt.
Plain language is given a broad definition in the Act, which emphasises that plain language is not only about how readable, clear and understandable the language is, but also about the comprehensiveness of the information that's given.
One important point to note about the definition is that it speaks about documents being understandable to the ‘ordinary consumer' with ‘minimal experience as a consumer of the relevant goods or services' - no more targeting the average level of experience, says Gordon.
The Act states explicitly that courts must interpret documents and contracts and forms to the benefit of the consumer, which means that companies can no longer try to hide behind vague clauses to give them wiggle-room in case there is a dispute after an agreement is signed.
The Commission is expected to publish guidelines for plain language once it comes into existence. According to Simplified, we can expect the following from the Commission:
- More guidelines on how to tell whether a document is in plain language
- Requirements for user testing
- More interest in which language to use for which types of documents. We cannot assume that plain English or plain Afrikaans is plain language.
"We believe that clear communications can bring business benefits, from attracting new clients and building brand loyalty to reducing the cost of queries and producing documents more efficiently," says Gordon. "Companies should think about it in this light rather than seeing it only as a compliance issue."
