Research problem: Interest in plain-language communication has been growing in many sectors of business and government, but knowledge about its development is scattered and in need of synthesis. Research questions: 1. How did plain language in the US evolve to gain acceptance by industry, government, and the public? 2. In what ways have advocates changed their vision of plain language? Literature review: My review identified a corpus of more than 100 publications relevant to the history of plain language from 1940 to 2015. Methodology: I evaluated the literature on plain language to identify milestones, events, and trends between 1940 and 2015. I focused on the evolution of plain language and on ways that practitioners altered their perspective of the field. Results: Between 1940 and 1970, plain language focused mainly on readability. During the 1970s, some practitioners began to employ usability testing. By the mid-1980s, there was a widespread sense that plain-language advocates had shifted priorities from readability to usability. Between 1980 and 2000, advocates broadened their vision-beyond word- and sentence-level concerns to include discourse-level issues, information design, and accessibility. Between 2000 and 2015, advocates continued to worry over their old questions (“Can people understand and use the content?”), but also asked, “Will people believe the content? Do they trust the message?” By 2015, plain language had gained significant momentum in business, government, medicine, and education. Conclusions: Plain language evolved over the past 75 years from a sentence-based activity focused on readability of paper documents to a whole-text-based activity, emphasizing evidence-based principles of writing and visual design for paper, multimedia, and electronic artifacts. Plain-language practitioners expanded their concerns from how people understand the content-the usability and accessibility of the content-to whether people trust the content. In addition to a narrative about the field's evolution, I offer a Timeline of Plain Language from 1940-2015, which chronicles the field's highlights. Together, the narrative and timeline offer a fairly comprehensive view of the current state of plain language and allow those with an interest to dig deeper.

SITUATING DOCUMENT DESIGN. What is Document Design? Evolution of the Field: Contextual Dynamics. OBSERVING READERS IN ACTION. How Documents Engage Readers' Thinking and Feeling. The Impact of Poor Design: Thinking about Ourselves as Users of Texts and Technology. Seeing the Text: The Role of Typography and Space. The Interplay of Words and Pictures. RESPONDING TO READERS' NEEDS. What Document Designers Can Learn from Readers. Appendices. Bibliography. Indexes. Colophon.

This study evaluated a method for teaching writers to anticipate readers' comprehension needs. The method, called reader-protocol teaching, involves asking writers to predict readers' problems with a text and then providing them with detailed readers' responses (in the form of think-aloud protocol transcripts) to illustrate how readers construct an understanding of the text. Writers in five experimental classes critiqued a set of ten poorly written instructional texts and then analyzed the protocol transcripts of readers struggling to comprehend these texts. Writers in five control classes were taught to anticipate the reader's needs through a variety of audience-analysis heuristics and collaborative peer-response methods. Pretests and posttests were used to assess improvements in experimental and control writers' ability to anticipate and diagnose readers' comprehension problems. Pretest and posttest materials were expository science texts. Writers taught with the reader-protocol teaching method improved significantly more than did writers in control classes in the number of readers' problems they accurately predicted. In addition, in contrast to writers in control classes, writers taught with the reader-protocol method significantly increased in their ability to (a) diagnose readers' problems caused by textual omissions, (b) characterize problems from the reader's perspective, and (c) attend to global-text problems. Moreover, writers' knowledge of audience acquired in one domain (instructional text) transferred to another (expository science text).

Since the mid 1960s, empirical approaches to scholarship in rhetoric and composition have emerged.' The use of empirical approaches can be seen in much of the work of scholars who study reading, writing, and literacy, their interconnections, and their relation to thinking and learning. Given the relative high profile of empirical approaches over the last three decades, most people in rhetoric and composition have some understanding of their nature. However, given the rise of recent challenges (Berlin; Irmscher; North), it seems important to begin a discussion about the assumptions that inform empirical inquiry. This paper is aimed at initiating such a discussion, and, in particular, it is concerned with characterizing theory building in empirical scholarship and research within the context of humanistic inquiry. In this way, I hope to show that empirical practices in rhetoric and composition can be important for provoking better rhetorics of inquiry (Nelson 430). Empirical scholarship and research in rhetoric and composition grow out of a tacit assumption that knowledge in our field is probabilistic and contextual. In its broadest sense, empirically based theory building is aimed at understanding and evaluating existing knowledge and at generating new knowledge about language-using in society. Empirical inquiry in rhetoric and composition is a humanistic activity that is built on the premise of the epistemic, dialectical, and generative nature of our knowledge. (See Scott's corpus for a sustained discussion of rhetoric as epistemic.) As with other kinds of knowledge-making, empirical knowledge is a product of a dialectic which takes place among a speaker, an interpretive community or social group in which the speaker is trying to contribute, and the historical, political, material, ideological, and situational context in which the speaker is working. For example, say that one is interested in exploring the role of sophistic rhetoric on Greek and Roman thinking through case histories of early