Am I the only person on Long Island who was motivated to read and understand the 16-page 2006 Annual Drinking Water Quality Report sent to my home? Unfortunately, I still can’t tell you what it said.

The frightening words, “arsenic,” “radon,” “molybdenum,” and “strontium 88,” certainly caught my attention, but I can’t tell you if my water has them and whether I should be worried about them. That’s because I would have to find my location within 35 Distribution Areas, and translate the low, high and average values for dozens of possible contaminants. This is a classic example of inundating people with data that yields no actual information. It’s presented on 16 pages of newsprint and literally looks like a sea of gray type. The only way to make this useful would be to customize the content so that it focused on the water supply for the location of my home and then wrote the conclusion in plain English.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 2nd, 2007 at 3:40 pm and is filed under clarity, complexity, disclosure, plain English, simplicity, simplification. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.