The U.S. Congress is holding hearings today to shame the CEOs of major credit card companies into disclosing their fees and interest rates in clearer language and perhaps even changing their policies for imposing them. Certainly, they can’t be surprised by this since most Cardholder Agreements are multi-panel scrolls which unfurl to reveal pages of tiny, light grey type bearing the title, “Important Changes to Your Retail Installment Credit Agreement.” Given the title, “Important,” you might try to read it and you’ll find this:

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Apparently, as they say, “all that glitters is not gold.” Last week, I saw a television ad from Zales, the largest specialty jewelry retailer. It consisted of many pieces of attractive diamond jewelry, each described with a full price and then a markedly lower current price for Valentine’s Day. Clearly, the point of the ad was the fantastic pricing. So, I was amazed to see fine print at the bottom of the screen which said: “Original prices may not have resulted in actual sales.”

What does that mean? I think it means that the original price they quoted was a fiction–no one actually ever bought the jewelry at the higher price. They simply quoted a high number so that they current price sounded dramatically lower.

Really, duping the lovestruck seems unnecessarily cruel.

Jane Brody wrote an article in the January 30, 2007 issue of The New York Times discussing the topic of health literacy. Although she mentions that “health illiteracy” is pervasive because it affects many strata of our society, the misinterpretations she cites will not be rectified by plain language and point to a more fundamental problem. One example—“Medication Should Be Taken With Plenty of Water”—was misinterpreted to mean “Don’t take when wet” and “Don’t drink hot water.” These misinterpretations point to general illiteracy, not health illiteracy. Unfortunately, I suspect that the people who were confused by such simple instructions are barely able to function in any aspect of their lives. They must require assistance to travel, to drive, to work, to dine out, etc.

My concern is that by muddying the issues of general illiteracy and health illiteracy, the medical community will find that solutions are unattainable and give up too easily. If we set a standard of communication for health topics that aims too low, many projects will never make it to the marketplace because the standard will be unrealistic. If someone can’t understand the words, “plenty of water,” it is absurd to think that they will ever understand a written explanation of “a 3% chance of death or serious injury from surgery.” However, many literate, well-educated people cannot understand medical consent forms and would benefit from plain language explanations and innovative information design techniques. The two topics—general illiteracy and health illiteracy—need to be disentangled because the solutions are not the same.

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.