communicatehealth.com

Festive sights, sounds, and smells abound, and we hope you’re enjoying the season as much as we are. Here’s the deal: Our darling Betti the Plain Language Yeti is on a quest for the Gift of Plain Language, and it’s up to you and your plain language know-how to help her! The bottom line: Warm wishes and holiday cheer to you and yours from all of us at CommunicateHealth! Tweet about it: Help Betti the Plain Language Yeti find the Gift of Plain Language!

In this week’s edition of our “use simpler words” series, we’re talking about “substance. In our experience here at We ❤︎ Health Literacy headquarters, the word “substance” tends to pop up most when writing about 2 topics: environmental health and drug and alcohol use. * Talk with your kids early and often about alcohol and drug use. so your readers don’t accidentally think you’re talking about, you know, polybrominated diphenylethers.

And if you’ve ever been involved in creating a website, you’ve almost certainly found yourself wondering, “What do people focus on when they look at my site? While usability testing helps you learn how well (or not well) features of your site work, eye tracking provides a more complete picture of users’ behavior. * Where they look on each page * How long they look at each page * The bottom line: Eye tracking gives you valuable information about how people use your site — and what’s catching their attention.

We’re all a bunch of health literacy lovers with passionate feelings about things like white space, plain language, and user testing. Explain how health literacy affects us all: 9 in 10 people have limited health literacy, which means they struggle to find, understand, and use health information. Like many of us, your colleagues may have learned early on that good writing is formal writing — or that there’s no significant difference between a website that’s user-friendly and one that isn’t. Before long your colleagues may want to join the We ❤︎ Health Literacy family (and we’d really ❤︎ that).