Health literacy and PHARMAC's Māori Health Team

I had a conversation about health literacy with Marama Parore, Manager of the Māori Health Team Te Whaioranga at PHARMAC

Health literacy is about being able to get the healthcare you need, in your own social context and your own community, so the people giving information and the people hearing or reading it understand each other.

Marama says that understanding health literacy underpins everything that PHARMAC’s Māori Health Team does in their work with Māori and Pacific communities.

‘PHARMAC’s programmes are a mix of art and science’, she says. ‘We are strengthening the cultural competency of cardiovascular nurses to work side-by-side with communities — nurses use enabling language only, they make no assumptions about people’s literacy, and they make no judgments. They value people where they are.’

Programmes build awareness and action
PHARMAC’s programmes develop their own momentum. One Heart Many Lives has led to Ironmāori. It’s a 2km swim, 90km cycle, and 21.1km run held at Pandora Pond in Napier. This year’s Ironmāori Half Ironman event was booked out in eight minutes, and next December 2000 people will line up to compete — they are managing their own health.

The Māori Health Team’s goal for PHARMAC’s community programmes goes beyond the first step. One Heart Many Lives, for example, began as an awareness-raising campaign in 2003, because communities were losing their kaumātua too young.

One Heart Many Lives was a way of encouraging people to get their hearts checked or enrol in screening programmes for cancer. Marama’s team made it easy for people to get on a track that leads to desirable actions — get their hearts checked, take medication, tell others, be a role model. Now Marama is seeing people use their knowledge to influence others.

Technology spreads the messages
Marama is quick to recognise that technology can spread PHARMAC’s health messages. PHARMAC develops tools and resources that support people to get the healthcare they need. ‘We’re using bright, shiny, new things like apps, underpinned by the fundamental principles of health literacy’, she says. ‘These tools and resources lead people to manage their own health and increase their knowledge. The messages get close to people and connect with them.’

— Rosemary Knight

Go to our website for links to more blogs about health literacy

Read about our workshop Writing Health Information Clearly

Watch those modifiers!

In English, word order is crucial to meaning.

Here's an important tip for clear writing: if something you write changes the meaning of something else, keep the two things together. When you don't, you're inviting confusion and frequently unexpected hilarity. Take, for example, the sentence:

I was introduced to my wife while travelling through a mutual friend.

Or this example, from Strunk and White:

Being in a dilapidated condition, I was able to buy the house very cheap.

I found one of my favourites in a valuation report:

Off the kitchen, there is a small porch with a sink, through which there is access to the garage.

Be particularly careful with words like 'only' and 'almost'. 'I'm sad because my only brother has died' is by no means the same thing as 'I'm sad because my brother has only died'.


In Johnson today, they've posted on a misplaced "ex"

THE Associated Press reported yesterday that

The former top media adviser to Prime Minister David Cameron was detained Wednesday on suspicion of perjury in the trial of a flamboyant ex-Scottish lawmaker -- the latest case tied to allegations of wrongdoing by British tabloid newspapers.

Who's that? Ex-what?

Andy Coulson, 44, was detained by Scottish police at his home in London over an accusation related to a high-profile case at Glasgow's High Court, when politician Tommy Sheridan was himself convicted of offering a false account after he successfully sued the now-defunct News of The World tabloid over its claim that he was embroiled in a sex-and-drugs scandal.

Tommy Sheridan's Wikipedia page details much of his "flamboyant" career, but nothing about having renounced his Scottish nationality. What he is is a Scottish ex-lawmaker, not an ex-Scottish lawmaker. As our style guide explains, ex- (and former) should be placed with that thing that has been left behind or revoked:

A Communist ex-member has lost his seat; an ex-Communist member has lost his party.

Our talk on health literacy to TCANZ

We host the local meetings of the Technical Communicators Association of NZ (TCANZ) here at Write. Rosie gave a talk on health literacy to TCANZ Wellington's Plain Language Group earlier this month.

Here's a brief talk-through of the slides from Rosie's presentation.

Read more about TCANZ Wellington Plain Language Group on the TCANZ website

Go to our website for links to more blogs about health literacy

Read about our workshop Writing Health Information Clearly

 

Time for the ClearMark Awards

Last week Washington DC saw a feast of plain language activity. As well as the Clarity conference, it was time for the ClearMark Awards, the United States plain language awards that are modelled on New Zealand's WriteMark Plain English Awards. The US-New Zealand links don't end there. This year three of the judges were from New Zealand -- Lynda Harris, Richard Bland, and Melua Watson all provided expertise on the international judging panels.


This year's Grand Prize Winner was a brochure about the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) -- the largest nationally representative assessment of what students in the United States know and can do.


So as you think about your entry for this year's WriteMark Awards, take a look at what's happening overseas.

Find out more about the Award winners

Read about the ClearMark judges here

Interrobangs and crash blossoms

At an office meeting today, the conversation turned to crash blossoms. We've discussed these odd beasts before in our blog. (A crash blossom is an ambiguous headline that can have more than one meaning.) A recent favourite from the Calgary Herald reads 'Police looking into death by Balzac' (21 March 2012).

Later today, I read David Crystal's blog about interrobangs, which made me think that the crash blossom and the interrobang are made for each other. Police looking into death by Balzac?!

Read David Crystal's blog

Have a chuckle over some crash blossoms

Don't be passive-aggressive

This opinion piece (by Constance Hale for the New York Times) has been doing the rounds.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/30/the-pleasures-and-perils-of-the-passive/

Constance explains the passive voice clearly. She gives some examples of its abuse, such as this politicians' favourite — cleverly labelled the 'past exonerative'.

But Constance doesn't jump on the everything-active bandwagon. Sometimes sentences are passive for a reason. Maybe the 'agent' in the sentence isn't as important as the subject, or isn't known. If your car has been stolen, you may never find a specific person to be angry at.

So don’t overuse the passive voice, but don’t fear it. After all, it might be just what was ordered by the doctor.

So what is professional writing?

'Professional’ is a word people bandy about — probably because it sounds impressive. Yes, but what does it mean?

Where writing is concerned, we at Write hear ‘professional’ used often by writers trying to describe how they want their writing to come across. ‘Professional’ has become a catchall term for everything about a piece of writing ranging from vocabulary to tone to layout.

For our two cents’ worth, professionalism implies correctness — specifically, correctness of expression. And let’s throw in consistency as well, while we’re on the job.

Professionalism means correctness of expression

Sorry, but correctness of expression involves all those school days do’s and don’ts. Wrong spelling, misused or missed out punctuation, sentences that are badly constructed — these create a bad impression on the reader. They suggest lack of professionalism because they imply laziness and lack of attention to detail. Which in turn reflect on an organisation as a whole.

If you are a lazy or careless writer, have the grace to disguise that fact by giving your writing to someone who is painstaking and takes pride in getting things correct.

Professionalism means consistency of expression

Consistency means using the same element of language or punctuation in a similar manner throughout a document. Here are three examples.

• If you use the word ‘report’ to refer to something, continue to use that same term (oops! I mean word) throughout.
• Be consistent with the way you punctuate bullet-pointed lists (you may have a style guide that provides a standard).
• If you use a capital letter for a word, for example Ministry, make sure you use the capital consistently.

We can’t all be experts

You may know you’re not blessed with the eye for detail that professionalism requires. So shoulder- tap someone in your organisation who is.

Hidden away in every organisation are members of a fast-dying race — proofreaders — to whom I will dedicate a future blog. Ask one of these rare beings to check your writing for correctness and consistency.

All the thanks they’ll want is the opportunity to explain to you why they’ve made changes — and you never know, you might learn something!