It’s all about the reader —Karen Schriver.

Karen Schriver is a plain language consultant and researcher. She launched her career at Carnegie Mellon University, where she co-directed the M.A. in Professional Writing and coordinated the Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Document Design. She also served as research director of the Communications Design Center, a nonprofit that won the Diana Award for its landmark research on computer documentation and plain language public documents.

After 10 years as a faculty member, Karen founded KSA Communication Design & Research to help organizations around the world recognize the social and economic importance of clear communication. She also served for many years as a member of the board for the Center for Plain Language.

Karen is a true leader in the field. She’s won 14 national and international awards and she wrote Plain Language in the US gains momentum, a paper that looks at 75 years of plain language!

Her contribution to the plain language movement

  • Her book Dynamics in Document Design: Creating Text for Readers is one of the first research-based portraits of what readers need from documents and of how document designers can take those needs into account. It is now in its 9th printing and it has been called a landmark in its field.