You can learn interesting things from obituaries. Sadly, I had not heard of David Mellinkoff until today, but when I noticed his obit on Wired, my interest was piqued. He was an attorney who advocated the use of plain English for law. He fought against “contagious verbosity”, was influential in the revision of California’s constitution, and published books on legal writing. Sounds like a great guy who stood up for a belief that very likely irritated many of his peers. Here’s his LA Times obit. In doing a web search on him, I discovered the Plain Language Action Network. They have a guide to writing user friendly documents. The point is not to dumb the language down or be boring and simple. The ideal is to have clarity, precision, and elegance for reader comprehension. It’s just like UI design, where a florid, artistically overdone website is rarely as usable as a simply elegant one. It’s harder and more impressive to create something beautifully usable and readable. Unfortunately, a lot of people forget that there has to be something beneath the surface.