ClearMark and WonderMark Awards Judges

Burkey Belser

Burkey Belser is the president and creative director of Greenfield/Belser, an interactive brand design agency focused on services market¬ing. He has won hundreds of awards in every major field of graphic design: identity, collateral, Web, periodicals—you name it. In 2007, Burkey was a judge for the Communication Arts Design Annual and more recently for the 2009 WebAwards and 2009 Creativity Awards. In 2005, he was awarded the first-ever Lifetime Achievement Award for the Legal Marketing Association (LMA), and in 2008, he was inducted into LMA’s Hall of Fame and the Art Directors Club of Metropolitan Washington's Hall of Fame.

In 1997, Burkey was awarded a Presidential Design Award by President Bill Clinton for his design of Nutrition Facts, the nation’s food labeling system, which the New York Times reported to be the most frequently published design of the 20th century (and now the 21st). He is featured in Who’s Really Who, Richard Saul Wurman’s compen¬dium that includes “1,000 succinct bios of the most interesting and creative individuals living in the U.S.” He served for two years as the president of the Art Directors Club of Metropolitan Washington. Greenfield/Belser’s work and studio has been featured in over a dozen books and many magazines. Burkey has been quoted on brand design topics by the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the WashingtonPost, the Los Angeles Times and dozens of industry publications.

Ann Brewer

Ann Brewer is the Director of the Executive Secretariat at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). While with the NIH she has been instrumental in developing and supporting their Plain Language Initiative. She moved to Washington, DC, in 2002. Prior to that, she was a life-long resident of Wisconsin. She received a B.S. in Nursing and a B.A. in Liberal Studies from the University of Wisconsin. She served on the Wisconsin Board of Nursing for seven years and was an Instructional Specialist Affiliate at the University of Wisconsin, School of Nursing, from 1995-1998. She has been a speaker at national, state, local health associations, as well as legislative hearings.

She led the Plain Language Initiative at the NIH for 6 years where she developed a computer-based plain language training and coordinated the NIH Plain Language Award Program. She served on the Board of Advisors and evaluated the plain language entries for the National Health Forum in 2006 and 2007. She has also been an active member of the Plain Language Action and Information Network since moving to Washington. Her entire career has focused around health care where speaking with clarity is absolutely essential.

Candi Harrison

Candi Harrison was Department Web Manager at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development from 1995-2005. Under Candi’s leadership, HUD’s web products received numerous awards, including the first Digital Government Award (2000). In 2000, Candi founded the Web Content Managers Forum, which currently more than 1,600 members across the country; and she served as Co-Chair of the Federal Web Managers Council from 2004 until she retired in September 2005, after 24 years of federal service.

Currently, Candi teaches courses for the General Services Administration’s Web Manager University and writes a blog, Candi On Content (candioncontent.blogspot.com), chronicling her experiences and ideas to improve the way government communicates with citizens.

From 1974 to1980, Candi was a member of student services staffs at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA and Rider University in Lawrenceville, NJ. She holds a Bachelors Degree in English Education and a Masters Degree in Higher Education Administration, both from Indiana University.

Candi lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Robert Linsky

Robert Linsky is Vice President, Design at NEPS, LLC, a leading communications management consulting firm. Robert is an expert in information design and document process solutions and has been creating solutions for a wide range of nationally and internationally recognized financial, insurance, healthcare and telecommunications companies

He has taught design and served as the chair of the design department at the New England School of Art & Design. Mr. Linsky served on the Board of Trustees of the Massachusetts College of Art & Design including two years as its Chair. He is an adjunct professor of design at MassArt and recently led a group of design students to China.

Robert is a member of the International Institute for Information Design (IIID), the Information Design Association, and the International Society of Graphic Designers, ltd. (ISGD). As the executive director of ISGD, Robert led designers on Design Dialogues to Russia, China and Eastern Europe.

He is a fellow of the Communications Research Institute and is on the editorial board of the Information Design Journal. Robert also writes a blog about information design (http://informationdesigndoc.blogspot.com)

Allen Rotz

Allen Rotz is currently a technical writer on contract to the Drug Enforcement Administration. He produces the user manual for a complex public website. Previously, he developed understandable and workable policy and procedures for the DEA’s Office of Information Security.

Allen comes to his current career by a rather unusual path. He has a B.S. in electrical engineering from Penn State and worked for 15 years for the National Security Agency. Later, he earned a paralegal certificate from Georgetown and worked at several major DC law firms in patent and trademark litigation and then in obtaining DOJ approval of large corporate mergers and buy-outs.

This gave him the spark to take a series of courses in writing and information design at the USDA Graduate School. He was lucky to have as an instructor/mentor Thom Haller of Info Design. He also became very active in the Society for Technical Communication and is fortunate to have learned much about web and print communication from Ginny Redish of Redish & Associates. All of this led to attending a Plain Language presentation by Annetta Cheek in 2003 and a growing passion for Plain Language ever since.

Michael Schwartz

Michael Schwartz, a political scientist by training, retired from the federal government in 2009 after 33 years in the Department of Interior. He spent much of his federal career working on regulations and mineral resource policy and budget. Mike has been a member of the government's Plain Language Action and Information Network for 12 years, representing first the Bureau of Land Management and more recently the US Fish and Wildlife Service. In his last job, at the Fish and Wildlife Service, he improved clarity of FWS manuals and Federal Register documents by requiring them to incorporate plain language principles. Since his retirement, he continues to be active in plain language matters. Currently, he is working on a searchable bibliography format that captures literature about plain language.

Xanthi Scrimgeour

Xanthi Scrimgeour, MHEd, CHES, is the co-founder of CommunicateHealth, Inc. and a seasoned health literacy consultant. Xanthi’s 15-plus years of experience in state and local public health give her an on-the-ground understanding of the communication challenges facing today’s public health professionals. She has spent over a decade overseeing the development of consumer-based Web and print communications, including low-literacy public education materials. Her work synthesizes research-based recommendations from the fields of usability, health literacy, and health education. Xanthi’s current projects include developing environmental health education materials for recent immigrants and refugees. Xanthi is a talented facilitator and trainer who speaks nationally on health literacy and health education.

Donna Seifert

Donna Seifert is a historical archeologist and senior project manager with John Milner Associates, a cultural resources consulting firm. Her first experience with the challenges of presenting technical information was drafting her doctoral dissertation. She was the lucky recipient of many hours of editorial assistance from a fiction writer at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The lessons learned from that blunt critic of her writing sparked a life-long quest to write clear, direct, and precise text.

Donna devoted several years as an associate editor to Historical Archaeology, the journal of the Society for Historical Archaeology, managing peer review of submission and preparing manuscripts for publication. For the last two years, she served as a judge for the Deetz Award, which recognizes excellence in books on historical archaeology that satisfy the professional but are accessible to a lay reader. Her day job includes editing technical reports written by architectural historians and archeologists.

Dr. Susan Sharpe

Dr. Susan Sharpe is Emeritus Professor of English at Northern Virginia Community College, where she has taught composition and literature to an international audience for over thirty years. Her occasional essays on education, family and the natural world have appeared in The Washington Post and Washingtonian Magazine. She is the author of a textbook on composition and four novels for school age children, who demand the plainest language of all.

Carolyn Sherman

Carolyn Sherman, vice president of the Murawski Group, has been advocating and practicing the principles of Plain Language since she began training writers in 1984. She has worked with writers from every major agency in the federal government, from the Congressional Budget Office to NASA, and from organizations as diverse as Starbucks and the National Academy of Sciences. A recent project she helped design won the first Plain Language Award for the US Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) at the Department of Homeland Security. An earlier Plain Language project for the Department of Education won Best Practice Award from the Association of Government Accountants (AGA). An article describing the project was co-authored by Ms. Sherman and published in the AGA magazine. Ms. Sherman took active part with other Murawski Group members and federal staff in re-writing the Federal Register's chapter on writing regulations in Plain Language. Her work with several clients was instrumental in their winning numerous Hammer Awards during the Clinton Administration. Ms. Sherman is a former Fulbright scholar.

Cheryl Stephens

Actively engaged in plain language activity since 1989, Cheryl Stephens founded the Plain Language Association International in 1993. Her 4-book series Plain Language Wizardry includes Plain Language Legal Writing and the new Plain Language in Plain English. Cheryl was a pioneer in using plain language on the Internet, and created the Plain Language Online website for the Canada’s Access to Justice Network in 1994 and the plain language online training site PlainTrain.

Cheryl received her B.A. (with Honors) in the multi-disciplinary field of International Relations at University of the Pacific in 1970. With a JD from the University of British Columbia and law practice experience, she lead the Canadian Bar Association’s BC projects on plain language and the Lawyers for Literacy Project.

Since 2000, Cheryl has created 4500 plain English definitions for the Multilingual Legal Dictionary at legalglossary.ca, created plain language training resources for the Council of Canadian Administrative Tribunals, and assisted the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police to develop resources for plain language and literacy awareness. She has also worked on plain language projects in the medical and social science fields and for multi-cultural and literacy programs.

CPL Home > Awards > Judges
ClearMark and WonderMark Awards Judges
Burkey Belser Burkey Belser is the president and creative director of Greenfield/Belser, an interactive brand design agency focused on services market¬ing. He has won hundreds of awards in every major field of graphic design: identity, collateral, Web, periodicals—you name it. In 2007, Burkey was a judge for the Communication Arts Design Annual and more recently for the 2009 WebAwards and 2009 Creativity Awards. In 2005, he was awarded the first-ever Lifetime Achievement Award for the Legal Marketing Association (LMA), and in 2008, he was inducted into LMA’s Hall of Fame and the Art Directors Club of Metropolitan Washington's Hall of Fame. In 1997, Burkey was awarded a Presidential Design Award by President Bill Clinton for his design of Nutrition Facts, the nation’s food labeling system, which the New York Times reported to be the most frequently published design of the 20th century (and now the 21st). He is featured in Who’s Really Who, Richard Saul Wurman’s compen¬dium that includes “1,000 succinct bios of the most interesting and creative individuals living in the U.S.” He served for two years as the president of the Art Directors Club of Metropolitan Washington. Greenfield/Belser’s work and studio has been featured in over a dozen books and many magazines. Burkey has been quoted on brand design topics by the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the WashingtonPost, the Los Angeles Times and dozens of industry publications. Ann Brewer Ann Brewer is the Director of the Executive Secretariat at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). While with the NIH she has been instrumental in developing and supporting their Plain Language Initiative. She moved to Washington, DC, in 2002. Prior to that, she was a life-long resident of Wisconsin. She received a B.S. in Nursing and a B.A. in Liberal Studies from the University of Wisconsin. She served on the Wisconsin Board of Nursing for seven years and was an Instructional Specialist Affiliate at the University of Wisconsin, School of Nursing, from 1995-1998. She has been a speaker at national, state, local health associations, as well as legislative hearings. She led the Plain Language Initiative at the NIH for 6 years where she developed a computer-based plain language training and coordinated the NIH Plain Language Award Program. She served on the Board of Advisors and evaluated the plain language entries for the National Health Forum in 2006 and 2007. She has also been an active member of the Plain Language Action and Information Network since moving to Washington. Her entire career has focused around health care where speaking with clarity is absolutely essential. Candi Harrison Candi Harrison was Department Web Manager at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development from 1995-2005. Under Candi’s leadership, HUD’s web products received numerous awards, including the first Digital Government Award (2000). In 2000, Candi founded the Web Content Managers Forum, which currently more than 1,600 members across the country; and she served as Co-Chair of the Federal Web Managers Council from 2004 until she retired in September 2005, after 24 years of federal service. Currently, Candi teaches courses for the General Services Administration’s Web Manager University and writes a blog, Candi On Content (candioncontent.blogspot.com), chronicling her experiences and ideas to improve the way government communicates with citizens. From 1974 to1980, Candi was a member of student services staffs at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA and Rider University in Lawrenceville, NJ. She holds a Bachelors Degree in English Education and a Masters Degree in Higher Education Administration, both from Indiana University. Candi lives in Tucson, Arizona. Robert Linsky Robert Linsky is Vice President, Design at NEPS, LLC, a leading communications management consulting firm. Robert is an expert in information design and document process solutions and has been creating solutions for a wide range of nationally and internationally recognized financial, insurance, healthcare and telecommunications companies He has taught design and served as the chair of the design department at the New England School of Art & Design. Mr. Linsky served on the Board of Trustees of the Massachusetts College of Art & Design including two years as its Chair. He is an adjunct professor of design at MassArt and recently led a group of design students to China. Robert is a member of the International Institute for Information Design (IIID), the Information Design Association, and the International Society of Graphic Designers, ltd. (ISGD). As the executive director of ISGD, Robert led designers on Design Dialogues to Russia, China and Eastern Europe. He is a fellow of the Communications Research Institute and is on the editorial board of the Information Design Journal. Robert also writes a blog about information design (http://informationdesigndoc.blogspot.com) Allen Rotz Allen Rotz is currently a technical writer on contract to the Drug Enforcement Administration. He produces the user manual for a complex public website. Previously, he developed understandable and workable policy and procedures for the DEA’s Office of Information Security. Allen comes to his current career by a rather unusual path. He has a B.S. in electrical engineering from Penn State and worked for 15 years for the National Security Agency. Later, he earned a paralegal certificate from Georgetown and worked at several major DC law firms in patent and trademark litigation and then in obtaining DOJ approval of large corporate mergers and buy-outs. This gave him the spark to take a series of courses in writing and information design at the USDA Graduate School. He was lucky to have as an instructor/mentor Thom Haller of Info Design. He also became very active in the Society for Technical Communication and is fortunate to have learned much about web and print communication from Ginny Redish of Redish & Associates. All of this led to attending a Plain Language presentation by Annetta Cheek in 2003 and a growing passion for Plain Language ever since. Michael Schwartz Michael Schwartz, a political scientist by training, retired from the federal government in 2009 after 33 years in the Department of Interior. He spent much of his federal career working on regulations and mineral resource policy and budget. Mike has been a member of the government's Plain Language Action and Information Network for 12 years, representing first the Bureau of Land Management and more recently the US Fish and Wildlife Service. In his last job, at the Fish and Wildlife Service, he improved clarity of FWS manuals and Federal Register documents by requiring them to incorporate plain language principles. Since his retirement, he continues to be active in plain language matters. Currently, he is working on a searchable bibliography format that captures literature about plain language. Xanthi Scrimgeour Xanthi Scrimgeour, MHEd, CHES, is the co-founder of CommunicateHealth, Inc. and a seasoned health literacy consultant. Xanthi’s 15-plus years of experience in state and local public health give her an on-the-ground understanding of the communication challenges facing today’s public health professionals. She has spent over a decade overseeing the development of consumer-based Web and print communications, including low-literacy public education materials. Her work synthesizes research-based recommendations from the fields of usability, health literacy, and health education. Xanthi’s current projects include developing environmental health education materials for recent immigrants and refugees. Xanthi is a talented facilitator and trainer who speaks nationally on health literacy and health education. Donna Seifert Donna Seifert is a historical archeologist and senior project manager with John Milner Associates, a cultural resources consulting firm. Her first experience with the challenges of presenting technical information was drafting her doctoral dissertation. She was the lucky recipient of many hours of editorial assistance from a fiction writer at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The lessons learned from that blunt critic of her writing sparked a life-long quest to write clear, direct, and precise text. Donna devoted several years as an associate editor to Historical Archaeology, the journal of the Society for Historical Archaeology, managing peer review of submission and preparing manuscripts for publication. For the last two years, she served as a judge for the Deetz Award, which recognizes excellence in books on historical archaeology that satisfy the professional but are accessible to a lay reader. Her day job includes editing technical reports written by architectural historians and archeologists. Dr. Susan Sharpe Dr. Susan Sharpe is Emeritus Professor of English at Northern Virginia Community College, where she has taught composition and literature to an international audience for over thirty years. Her occasional essays on education, family and the natural world have appeared in The Washington Post and Washingtonian Magazine. She is the author of a textbook on composition and four novels for school age children, who demand the plainest language of all. Carolyn Sherman Carolyn Sherman, vice president of the Murawski Group, has been advocating and practicing the principles of Plain Language since she began training writers in 1984. She has worked with writers from every major agency in the federal government, from the Congressional Budget Office to NASA, and from organizations as diverse as Starbucks and the National Academy of Sciences. A recent project she helped design won the first Plain Language Award for the US Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) at the Department of Homeland Security. An earlier Plain Language project for the Department of Education won Best Practice Award from the Association of Government Accountants (AGA). An article describing the project was co-authored by Ms. Sherman and published in the AGA magazine. Ms. Sherman took active part with other Murawski Group members and federal staff in re-writing the Federal Register's chapter on writing regulations in Plain Language. Her work with several clients was instrumental in their winning numerous Hammer Awards during the Clinton Administration. Ms. Sherman is a former Fulbright scholar. Cheryl Stephens Actively engaged in plain language activity since 1989, Cheryl Stephens founded the Plain Language Association International in 1993. Her 4-book series Plain Language Wizardry includes Plain Language Legal Writing and the new Plain Language in Plain English. Cheryl was a pioneer in using plain language on the Internet, and created the Plain Language Online website for the Canada’s Access to Justice Network in 1994 and the plain language online training site PlainTrain. Cheryl received her B.A. (with Honors) in the multi-disciplinary field of International Relations at University of the Pacific in 1970. With a JD from the University of British Columbia and law practice experience, she lead the Canadian Bar Association’s BC projects on plain language and the Lawyers for Literacy Project. Since 2000, Cheryl has created 4500 plain English definitions for the Multilingual Legal Dictionary at legalglossary.ca, created plain language training resources for the Council of Canadian Administrative Tribunals, and assisted the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police to develop resources for plain language and literacy awareness. She has also worked on plain language projects in the medical and social science fields and for multi-cultural and literacy programs.