Translating a Policy Document into Plain English

This assignment, by Timothy Laquintano, is from TextGenEd: Teaching with Text Generation Technologies in the WAC Clearinghouse Repository.

The abstract from the site explains:

This assignment asks undergraduate students to translate a complex policy document into plain English and then compare their output to the output of a large language model asked to do the same task. Students critically examine the semantic choices and sacrifices they made during the translation with the meaning lost during the machine translation, which attunes them to the risks and benefits of LLM output. It can be adapted to most disciplines and course levels.

Key Features of the Assignment

Plain Language Translation
This assignment requires students to translate complex policy documents into plain English, enhancing their ability to convey information clearly and effectively to a broader audience.
Writing for Accessibility
Students learn to write in a way that makes policy documents more accessible, ensuring that the content is understandable to people with varying levels of literacy and expertise.
Editing and Simplification
The assignment focuses on editing and simplification techniques, teaching students to identify and remove jargon, reduce sentence complexity, and improve the overall readability of policy documents.