One of the bills featured in this morning’s WashingtonWatch.com Digest is S. 574, the Plain Writing Act of 2009.

It would be great to get government to write clearly about what they do and what they want us to do. But the fact is that plain English has been a project for several years now, and I don’t know that we’ve seen much improvement. More than a decade ago, President Clinton issued a memorandum telling agencies to use plain language, and there’s an entire government Web site on plain language already.

You can’t paper over complex government by calling for simple English. Making the government simpler and making the laws and regulations simpler and more straightforward is what’s going to get you better communications.

Best of luck to the author of the Plain Writing Act, but I don’t expect it to change much.

Here’s the current vote on S. 574, the Plain Writing Act of 2009. Click to vote, comment, learn more, or edit the wiki article about the bill.