The Plain English Institute has become the first organization in the United States to publish plain English certification standards for documents.
PEI’s President, Mark Cohen, said, “There is some consensus on what plain English is, but until now no organization has published concrete standards intended to help organizations create documents in plain English.”
PEI’s standards attempt to strike a balance between useful general principles and measurable specificity. For instance, general advice to avoid passive avoid, while useful, is not measurable. PEI’s standards require that instances of passive voice in a document must not exceed ten percent.