14 May 2026: Nakedize founder, Simon Hertnon, introduces a new framework that boldly embraces and expands on the practice of plain language.
Introduction
Change is afoot at Nakedize, and it’s all because of the societal need for what I’m calling helpful information.
In short, global society is suffering from an ever-increasing flood of low-or-no-value information, leaving us highly occupied consuming information, but lacking the relatively small amount of knowledge we really need.
If you slow down and think about it, for any society to survive and thrive requires its citizens to know how to live well, and then enough of those citizens working together to put that knowledge into practice.
We can all observe that global society is not living sustainably, despite its access through information to countless generations worth of accumulated knowledge. This worrying situation strikes me as being the most important challenge of our time. It tells me that we have a problem with how we create, consume, and make use of information, and that it is crucial that enough of us team up to urgently address this problem.
Our reality is too many of us are now overwhelmed with ever-increasing quantities of unhelpful information that buries, obscures, and dilutes the relatively small amount of helpful information we need to change course.
So, here’s a first glimpse at my response, along with a very warm invitation to mull on it and contact me with feedback and suggestions.
I have designed the Helpful Information Framework for absolutely every one of us, hence my intention to seed a Helpful Information Network to enhance and invigorate the global plain language community.
And, if you’re working as a writer, rather than as a leader or manager, you should quickly realise that you can’t create ‘helpful information’ without the collaboration and support of your manager (and them, of all your their leaders).
This is the point. This is the key difference between helpful information and plain language: to acknowledge that information production is an organisational task, opportunity, and responsibility.
And below is a very basic accessible version of the table pictured above. Note, only 7 of the 20 qualities are common plain language qualities as defined by the 2023 ISO Plain Language Standard (ISO 24495-1) and New Zealand’s Plain Language Act 2022.
Helpful Information Framework (beta, 12 May 2026)
| Commissioned to deliver societal value | Designed to be consumed | Crafted to be understood | Produced to conserve resources |
|---|---|---|---|
| relevant | findable | understandable, clear* fourth of five essential qualities | co-designed |
| usable | sufficient | concise | costed |
| explicitly-needed first of five essential qualities | accessible | well organised | affordable* fifth of five essential qualities |
| ethical* second of five essential qualities | timely | tailored | efficiently-produced |
| accurate* third of five essential qualities | engaging and friendly | memorable | reusable |
* Essential qualities
(c) Simon Hertnon
Rationale
For more than 20 years, I have been teaching knowledge workers how to think more and write less-and-better so they can deliver more value to their organisations and, through them, to society.
For around 15 years, I have developed my reputation as a plain language professional, because plain language practice is all about creating information that is clear to the audience who needs the information.
But I have always felt that plain language doesn’t go far enough because, for example, clear information (crafted in plain language) can also be unneeded information, unethical information, inaccurate information, and so on.
This is why I have always specialised in one-pagers specifically, and concise information generally. Concise information leaves out the fluff that wastes time, puts off readers, and reduces comprehensibility and transparency. (In both the private and public sectors, concise writing is generally more attractive, engaging, and helpful.)
And while I don’t know of a single plain language practitioner who uses their skills to deliberately create unneeded, unethical, or inaccurate information, the holes in plain language definitions remain.
Every day, advertisers, marketers, journalists, politicians, corporations, influencers, and others create clear information that could be categorised as plain language, even though the information is unneeded, or unethical, or inaccurate, or a combination of those unhelpful qualities.
Meanwhile, given that the human brain has a limited capacity for processing information, it must also be true that if global society is producing ever-increasing quantities of unhelpful information, then there must be an ever-decreasing availability of attention for us to consume and make use of the helpful information we really need.
An intervention is needed, and the framework is the simplest intervention I could think of. It gets the unnamed, unmeasured and, thus, unsought qualities out in the open. It gives us all something to discuss with leaders and managers so, together, we can add appropriate quality standards to everything we do.
Next steps
For us: collaboration! I am already in discussions with several organisations, but very much focused on realising the potential of collaborating with an entire government through the exemplary Victorian State Government Plain Language Community of Practice, which has nearly 2000 members.
Tuning, experimenting, proposing, prototyping, and piloting are all being explored.
Again, please contact me if you’re interested in developing the framework and its practical implemenation.
For me: Investing in editing and rebuilding this tired, unloved web site so it meets the framework’s de facto standard! Then building a dedicated one, informed by hopefully many collaborations, for the Helpful Information Network I have envisaged.
More updates to come, but it feels good to finally share this initiative publicly.
Wish me luck!