Please excuse me while I borrow Andrew’s blog for a minute, but I just wanted to join in on the chatter in an earlier blog about the pitfalls of communicating science to the general public.
We pride ourselves on being a science-based organisation and on putting the consumer first, so the big question we deal with on a daily basis is: how do you maintain scientific accuracy while making the science easy for people to understand?
Effective communication is about thinking how messages are received rather than how they are sent out. And that isn’t just about avoiding words that people need a specialist dictionary to translate, it’s also about communicating in a way that will engage and interest people – what’s the point in us talking about ‘levels of a genotoxic carcinogen above the TDI’ if people are just going to pick up their Daily Tabloid and read about how we are all going to die? Why can’t we talk about unsafe levels of a harmful chemical instead? It might not have all the detail, but it tells people most of what they need to know.
Yes, I know some think that simplifying the language we use is dumbing down our advice, but our challenge is communicating with everyone in the UK, and doing so against the daily barrage of (often tabloidese) information. To be heard and heeded, too, our advice needs to be succinct and easy to understand but also accurate.
So, over to you, how do we get the balance right?