Gael Spivak’s transformation of the communications plan for the ISO plain language standard
Gael Spivak (pictured above) is a Canadian editor and writer who consistently makes significant impacts to the organizations that she works for, whether as a volunteer or as an employee.
We met with Gael Spivak to discuss the International Organization for Standardization’s (ISO) plain language standard ISO 24495-1:2023, Gael’s role as the Chair of the Localization and Implementation Committee, and her idea to integrate communications into the process and how she accomplished that goal.
What's the Idea: Could you provide context on how the ISO plain language standard itself got started?
Gael Spivak: The standard actually has a long history. The international community has been talking about it for at least 10 years. There was discussion about did they need an international standard, what the definition of plain language was, [and] what kind of standard would it be: outcome-based, or would it describe what plain language was? Because those are two different things. So, there was all this exploratory work that happened before the standard was even thought of.
I wasn't involved in the community at the time, but I've gone back and read all the material. In 2018, there was an article that I read in The Clarity Journal about how the community was going to move forward with doing an international standard and they wanted people to get involved in their different countries.
I was president of Editors Canada at the time, so I asked our board of directors if we could write a letter of support to the folks who were doing it. So, we did do that. I then contacted the Standards Council of Canada to see about getting involved. I knew some names, but I didn't know any of the people at the time, so I was really lucky that the ISO held their technical committee meeting in Ottawa in 2019.
[ISO’s] Technical Committee 37 (ISO/TC 37) is the ISO committee that deals with everything to do with language, [like] translation standards, technical vocabulary, all that kind of stuff. So, that was the technical committee that people from Standards Australia thought would be the best committee to approach, and it was Standards Australia that really pushed this through.
Gael’s involvement with the plain language standard began by attending a conference in 2019 in Ottawa, Ontario, the capital of Canada.
I went to that meeting in Ottawa, and that is where I met Christopher Balmford from Australia and Annetta Cheek from the US. They were there that week to talk to Technical Committee 37 about creating an ISO standard for plain language.
I helped Christopher during that week when he was talking to different groups because we would have little meetings where people would bring up their concerns about such a standard. People would say it won't work in government, [or] it won’t work in other languages. It helped because I was there as a government person, and I was like, “My workplace works in English and French.”
And then there were a lot of concerns from lawyers about whether or not it would work for people who had a bit of knowledge about the law. Christopher is a lawyer and he's a plain language expert, so he was able to answer those questions. Annetta was the person who got the Plain Writing Act [a US federal government standard] into place when she worked in government. [There’s] legislation in the US that requires federal government departments to communicate in plain language. I'd known about Annetta for a long time and I was kind of in awe of meeting her. By the end of the meeting, the technical committee voted yes, they would support it.
“It’s a very long process because it’s so consultative... You don’t have to have total agreement, but every single comment has to be addressed. Every single comment.”
But then a working group had to be created to work on the standard itself, [which] was Working Group 11. That got created and we started working on it. You get a drafting committee that gets together and starts working on a draft, and you go through multiple drafts with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of comments from people around the world. It's a very long process because it's so consultative. It’s a broad consensus model, which is where you get a committee to basically agree with the product. You don't have to have total agreement, but every single comment has to be addressed. Every single comment. And you can't just say no to a comment. If you say no, you have to say why, and the response is available to the committee.
It's very collaborative, and people feel very involved in the drafts as they get changed. It took about a year, maybe longer. There's a draft and it goes to the working group and they all comment on it. The working group has people from around the world, and then those comments get incorporated and then it goes to all the people on the broader Technical Committee 37, and it goes to all the countries who belong to Technical Committee 37, and they all get to comment, and then it goes back, and so it goes through a couple of rounds. So I think all in all, we had about a thousand comments on the standard on the first one.
I actually edited an early draft. After the first draft was written, I had some ideas that I thought would make it a little more plain language. So, I asked if I could edit it and show my ideas, and they liked it. Since then, I've been the editor for the working group for each of the other parts that we've been working on.
After you have all the comments, it does go to the ISO editor. They have an editing team, and then [they] came back with some stuff that we talked with her [about]. We had some really good, collaborative meetings with that editor.
[For example,] with lists, when you have a list of items, if it's just one long sentence, it's really hard to understand, [which goes against plain language principles]. So, we worked with the editor to allow us to word it in such a way so that it wasn't just a long sentence, but it still followed ISO rules, [because] there's very strict rules about [what] an ISO standard looks like, the punctuation, the sentence structure, and all that kind of thing.
The standard itself follows all plain language principles except for one, which is addressing people directly using the second person pronoun in English. You're not allowed to do that in ISO standards, so we weren't able to do that, but we mention that we weren't able to do that.
Effective collaboration with many people from many different countries helped achieve Gael’s goal.
What's the Idea: That sounds like that's a great success rate. After all that work, it was implemented, accepted, and published. Is that when you were asked to chair the Localization and Implementation Committee?
Gael Spivak: Annetta Cheek asked me to chair it. When Annetta asks me to do something, it's pretty much impossible to say no. She said, “Okay, you're the chair,” but I didn't know what to do. The committee is called the Localization and Implementation Committee, which has three responsibilities: localization, adoption, and implementation.
Localization is when the committee helps countries localize the standard, which means making it work in their language or their country. The standard, as it's written, will work in any language, but when people translate it, they might want to add some information that's particular to their language.
All the examples in the standard and all the principles work in any language, [but] because the standard is written in English, the examples are all in English. So if someone translates it into another language, the principles will all still apply, but new examples are done in their own language.
I know a little bit about localization because I work in a bilingual environment. So, I get the concept, right?
What's the Idea: That process is something we have to do as Canadians, in an official capacity at least.
Gael Spivak: Adoption is the process of a country going through the technical steps in order to get an ISO standard adopted as a standard in their country. For the adoption part, I knew a fair bit about it because I talked to the Standards Council of Canada about that process, I talked to the Canadian General Standards Board about adopting it for Canada, and I had a lot of conversations with Christopher Balmford in Australia about that. Christopher and I wrote some documents together on the steps that people could take if they want their country to adopt the standard.
But the thing I thought was not really being addressed with my committee was the communications part. I work in communications, so it was obvious to me. So that's when I thought, okay, we can do some communications around this. It became much bigger than I was expecting [it] to be, but it was pretty great. The press release we wrote [was] translated into 31 languages.
“We had to have strategic messages, but we didn’t have a communications plan... If you’re going to write an article about it or if you’re going to post on LinkedIn about it, or other social media, it’s good to have agreed-upon messaging and alignment.”
What's the Idea: What gap was missing that you saw?
Gael Spivak: We had to have strategic messages, but we didn't have a communications plan. A communications plan will have messaging so you're all saying the same thing when you communicate. What you say to people is consistent, you use the same terminology, you're getting the same ideas across. If you're going to write an article about it or if you're going to post on LinkedIn about it, or other social media, it's good to have agreed-upon messaging and alignment.
I'm really not very good at doing that kind of thing, so I asked a friend of mine for some help. She's a brilliant strategist for communications, so she wrote a comm[unications] plan for us with key messaging in it.
We worked on it, various people had input into it, and it got approved by the board of directors for the International Plain Language Federation. Then we took that approved messaging, which also had plans about what to do. The plans included “do a press release”, “reach out to communities on social media”, that kind of thing.
We had a social media kit that we sent to all the members of the plain language organizations around the world. Wording was already done for them for social media posting, so they didn't have to think of it on their own. They could just post it. We also included pictures with it because if you include a picture with a social media post, the engagement just goes up a huge amount. There were about 20 different posts, so a broad basis that won’t cause too much overlap.
What's the Idea: Do you have an idea how successful that was? Did all the plain language committees use them or did a lot of committees use the press materials that you sent out to them?
Gael Spivak: A lot of individuals did. So because of all that communications work, one person and I sent the press release to 700 government and private organizations around the world.
The publication of the ISO plain language standard was extremely successful thanks to the social media kits and press releases created as part of the communication plan.
What's the Idea: Wow.
Gael Spivak: Yeah. We spent a couple days emailing. So along with the social media kits, it meant that we got almost 2500 views on the English press release. The other press releases had less because we had it in all those languages, but several, [like] the French one, had something like 400 views. People were paying attention.
On the ISO standard, there were over 25,000 views of the English version of the standard on the website. ISO told us that that was one of the top 50 page views for standards on the website between the publication date on June 21st, 2021 to September 20th [2021]. We were in the top 50 for views, and there's almost 25,000 ISO standards. So that's a pretty good effect that we had in that time period.
What's the Idea: That’s in the absolute top percentage then (0.002%). That’s amazing.
Gael Spivak: Yeah. Yeah.
What's the Idea: Two questions from there. How many people did you have working on this committee with you, and how did you find all those government and plain language committees?
Gael Spivak: Carolyn Wilby and I created the document of all the people to reach out to, with input from Cinzia Theobald. For editing and writing groups, I already have a spreadsheet that has every editing and editing adjacent association in the world. Greg [Ioannou] and I had that from the 2015 international editing conference that we put together, so we used that.
Carolyn's background is in finance and plain language, so she had a lot of ideas about who to contact in the finance and insurance world. Then I made a list of the top three to five cities in every province and territory in Canada and found their communications, [like] email address and their social media so I could tag them in social media. So, yeah, it was a lot of research beforehand. Carolyn and I spent a few months researching. Most of that communications work was done by me, Carolyn, and Cinzia.
What's the Idea: Was it just a small, dedicated committee?
Gael Spivak: The three of us had experience with communications, so we did the bulk of that [work]. Other people on the committee are doing things that I have no expertise in. There's a lot of work being done on creating a lexicon. It will have keywords that will be used to talk about the plain language standard consistently across different languages.
What's the Idea: Interesting.
“The definition of plain language that the international community agrees on, that’s the basis of the standard, so it’s important that it’s available in many different languages.”
Gael Spivak: That whole world is a mystery to me, but that's part of localization and translation.
What's the Idea: So, you're aware of it in terms of being the chair, but you're not as focused on it in your day-to-day work.
Gael Spivak: Yeah. We had people looking at the definition as well, and that's kind of tied to translation and localization. Because the definition of plain language that the international community agrees on, that's the basis of the standard, so it's important that it's available in many different languages.
But some aspects of the definition are really hard to translate and to talk about, as we discovered when talking about it. Communication is an abstract kind of word. It can mean communications or it can mean a communications product. So, different things. In some languages, there's no words to cover all of that.
What's the Idea: Your work with this committee is ongoing work, without a specific end date in sight at this point?
Gael Spivak: That's right.
What’s the Idea: Could you explain the difference between these different organizations?
Gael Spivak: This committee is a committee of the International Plain Language Federation. It's not an ISO committee. There are three plain language organizations in the world.
There's the Plain Language Association International. That has a lot of government and health people in it, and it's the largest one. [It] was started by Canadians Cheryl Stephens and Kate Harrison Whiteside, but it's an international organization now.
There's Clarity International, which is the association for plain language and the law. A lot of lawyers belong to that.
And then there's the Center for Plain Language, which is for Canada, the US, and Mexico.
Then there's an organization that works on items that the three organizations together want to work on, so that it's easier to coordinate the work going through this other organization. That's the International Plain Language Federation. It's just an umbrella organization, made up of people who belong to the other three organizations. You can't belong to the Federation. You belong to one of those three organizations and then the Federation has committees that do work that these three organizations all agree that we need to do.
What's the Idea: I love the ever-growing collaborative web that I’m learning about that seems to be integral to this process. It's kind of amazing.
Gael Spivak: Yeah, the international plain language community is brilliantly collaborative, and they're very supportive of each other. They're very eager to have new people and find out what you can do, and they're very welcoming.
So, [the Federation] had a standards committee that Annetta Cheek chaired, and that was the committee that did all the work to get to the point of the Australian Standards organization going to ISO to get them to agree to write the standard.
Once that work was accomplished, they needed to create another committee to deal with the fact that the standard was being published. That was my committee. There's a certification committee and then there's other committees that the federation has.
Our committee is international. I have people from 24 countries… I think there’s more now, actually, so at least 24 countries.
What's the Idea: How often do you meet for this kind of work?
Gael Spivak: About every two months. When we meet, we talk about what's going on in each of our countries. We have little subcommittees who go off and do our work, and in our committee meetings, we report on where everything is at. We compare what's not working in terms of translation, and adoption, of the pricing of the standard, which varies by country, and implementation, like who's using it in each country. For the second part of our meeting, we focus on our work plan, [which has] things like the lexicon, [and] the definition. Someone's working on a translation briefing to help translators as they translate. And then there's the communications work. So those are all things that we've committed to do as a committee that is in our work plan, and we have to deliver on the first part of the plan, where we're talking about the work that each of us does in our own countries, that's just individual updates on the stuff that we do as plain language people.
Localization allows for the ISO standards to be adapted using references that are meaningful to the country’s population.
What's the Idea: As you went through the work of implementing that communications standards and process plan, did it expand? And did anything significantly change through the process?
Gael Spivak: No, but it was a tremendous amount of work to coordinate. For example, I had no idea how much work all of the translations of the press releases was going to be. Luckily, we have Angelika Vaasa on our committee. She manages the quality control unit for the European Parliament, [and] they do translation and editing for the European Parliament, so she had access to a lot of translators. People that those of us on the committee knew, like I know an editor in India who was willing to translate it into Hindi. And then just various plain language people around the world who all pitched in to get it translated. All volunteer work.
So then the Technical Committee 37—I'm back to talking about the ISO, not about my committee. Christopher Balmford was the chair of Working Group 11—asked me to talk at one of our working group meetings about this communications work, and then somebody asked if that could be presented to the Technical Committee 37 at a broader meeting, which I did.
“I’m very proud of the people I work with. It was only through the combination of us working together that we were able to do this because we all bring something to it. That’s the nature of the international plain language community.”
I couldn't attend the meeting—it was in Brussels—but I did a short presentation virtually on the communications part when the standard was published. So, the ISO was considering having that kind of communications model for all its standards, and the European Parliament is actually looking at it as an example of what they could do.
ISO Technical Committee 37 is working on many standards right now. As each of them gets published, that technical committee is thinking they could do something similar to what I did for those individual standards [for communication]. Technical Committee 37 is one of many technical committees in the ISO. So, ISO itself may start looking at having press releases and social media outreach when it publishes any of its standards.
What's the Idea: That was not happening before on a broad basis?
Gael Spivak: No.
What's the Idea: Amazing. And you mentioned the European Parliament is looking at this also?
Gael Spivak: Yeah, because Angelika is on the localization committee. She saw all of that work and she participated in it. She told me that the European Parliament is thinking of doing a similar thing when they announce certain things.
What's the Idea: So, you're seeing this international influence in a lot of different places. How does that feel?
Gael Spivak: I'm very proud of the people I work with. It was only through the combination of us working together that we were able to do this because we all bring something to it. That's the nature of the international plain language community. It's very collaborative and we discover that we can do these amazing things when we work together. So yeah, it feels good.
What's the Idea: I was going to ask about what you have learned from this process, but it sounds like you must be learning all the time.
Gael Spivak: Learning all the time. Yeah. Yeah. One interesting thing I learned while chairing these committees is that you always hear that people's sense of humor is different in different countries, which obviously is true, but one thing that seems to be the same is the feelings that people have about the bureaucracy that they encounter with their governments. The sarcasm that people use when they express that frustration, it seems to be pretty universal.
What's the Idea: I don’t know if it’s reassuring or scary to hear that that's something we all have in common.
Gael Spivak: Another thing I learned though is that countries approach standards very differently. In Finland, you don't have to pay for standards. It's very open. Anybody can be involved. Whereas in Canada, to create a national standard it costs a lot of money. About $250,000.
What's the Idea: That's for federal applications, things like that?
Gael Spivak: When you have a Canadian standard, you have to create a committee that has a broad representation of Canadians. So, it has to have users, producers, consumers, all kinds of different people, and then you have to have meetings and everything has to be in two languages. So that money pays for organizing all of that, and you have to have public consultations where you get comments from people, which is similar to the ISO process. Yeah, so $250,000 [for Canada], whereas in Finland it's just like no, the government will pay for it. So that differs around the world.
What's the Idea: Is there a Canadian standard that you could reference that we would all know?
Gael Spivak: There is a standard for labelling a food for genetically modified food, so somebody would have started a committee about genetically modified food and got it through. [It would focus on] if a food is genetically engineered or not, about the claims on food, on a label for someone to say this is genetically engineered or this is not genetically engineered.
There's also a translation standard in Canada, which I have been sitting on the committee for revising that standard. Some of them are mandatory, like safety standards, and then some are voluntary like the GE labelling standard or the translation standard.
“I didn’t expect to really get involved. I mean, I contacted my Canadian standards body and I thought I’d be quietly sitting on a committee, contributing with thousands of other people. I didn’t expect to get this involved, but it was that support for my colleagues that made them go, “Hey, let’s talk to her.””
What's the Idea: It’s remarkable how involved you are and how many different things you do, and all the expertise that you touch. Do you have any advice for people on how to put yourself out there to get involved with these different organizations? What did you do?
Gael Spivak: All I did was I wrote a letter to say Editors Canada supports you, and Christopher told me that made a difference. I think that made them notice me.
I didn't expect to really get involved. I mean, I contacted my Canadian standards body and I thought I'd be quietly sitting on a committee, contributing with thousands of other people. I didn't expect to get this involved, but it was that support for my colleagues that made them go, "Hey, let's talk to her."
Editors Canada has the CareerBuilder document for students, which was Greg's idea, but because Greg and I wrote that document together, I know there's a part on it that says, “join online communities of editors,” but there's [another] part that says, after a while, “start helping, answering questions.” So, being a helper has lots of benefits. The first one is you help people. But people also start to recognize your name, [and] you might become a go-to person for certain topics.
You get connections, you get friends. It's a bonding type thing, so it has a lot of good uses if you're helpful. And none of this was conscious, you know what I mean? I didn't set out to do this. It's only looking back on it that I can see the patterns of when I help people. And I do it for the helping part. It's later that I see that it caused other things to happen.
What's the Idea: You're helping people, you're creating those positive results, and if people know that going to you is a way to get those positive results, it's a powerful thing.
Gael Spivak: It also creates a lot more work, but that's okay.
What's the Idea: In terms of the committee’s communications work, what are you working on now or working on next?
Gael Spivak: We have two new parts of the standard that have been in development for quite a while. Part two is on legal writing and things that are particular to legal writing. It builds on part one of the standard, which is the principles of plain language. That drafting committee is chaired by Julie Clement, who is the president of Clarity [International], she's been a professor of legal drafting, and she works at the Michigan Supreme Court. It's also got lawyers from different languages and different countries on it, so it covers more than one type of legal system. We hope that one will be published this year [2025], so my team of me, Cinzia, and Carolyn are working on the press release and social media package for that.
And then [there’s] part three, which is [for] science writing. We're just now writing the press release and working on the social media kit for that. And then there's a few other standards that are in the works.
What's the Idea: Will that be years of work?
Gael Spivak: Yeah. Yeah. I noticed that a lot of our work plan will extend past when most of us will be dead, so other people need to come in and younger people need to come in and help out. I think I was the only one to notice that.
What's the Idea: That's a good call to action for a new generation to get involved with this work. You mentioned earlier that the European Parliament is looking at implementing this type of communications plan. Can you speak to any notable Canadian efforts to implement similar communications work?
Gael Spivak: The Government of Canada has The Canadian style, but there's also a style guide for Government of Canada websites, which has gotten more important over the years because more and more stuff has gone online. There's a section in the online content style guide for plain language. When the ISO plain language standard was published, the people responsible for that section of the style guide thought that it might be a good idea to align their style guide with the international standard. So, they did some work on that and it's significantly changed that section of the standard.
They found the blog post I wrote for the language portal of Canada on readability formulas. I originally wrote it just for me because I sometimes encounter people at my workplace who want to talk to me to tell me how great readability formulas are. And when I tell them that plain language experts don't endorse readability formulas, they don't believe me.
So I thought, “I'm going to summarize some of the research on this so that when that happens to me again. I have something to talk to people about.” I looked at the research of two important people who work in that field, Karen Schriver and Ginny Redish, and I wrote a summary of what I'd read of theirs.
And then I thought, “I better get them to check this to make sure it's accurate.” So, that was pretty awesome because then they gave me more information. But then I also knew that what I was saying was accurate and true. I told my localization implementation committee about it, and then Christopher said, "You need to get that published.”
Because the Language Portal of Canada had published a lot of my blog posts before, I thought I'll ask them. So they said, “yeah sure,” [and] they did it. And then I started noticing that people were quoting from it. I saw in an email, from Digital Services Canada maybe—they're responsible for government of Canada websites—where they said, "Yeah, we're going to start moving away from using readability formulas because of the research presented in this blog post." I was like, “That's mine.” So various government people have found this blog post of mine and have used it, so there's been a real movement away from readability formulas, which is great, because they're just not very good for plain language.
What's the Idea: Thank you so much for taking the time to explain how you accomplished all these amazing achievements.
Could your writing or business benefit from plain language editing? We can help.
The interview was recorded using Google Meet in February 2025.
Written by Matthew Long
Edited by ATP Editing and Matthew Long