Professor of Spanish at the University of Barcelona and expert communication consultant Estrella Montolío, spoke on May 10 at the Infoparticipa Seals award ceremony for quality and transparència of local public communication with its paper "The right to understand" in which he emphasizes the need for the administration to address the public in a more comprehensible way.
To Montolío, “The issue is not just access to information but it is understandable”, particularly now that, with the technological means at our disposal, there is “plenty of readability but misery of comprehensibility”. According to the linguist, administrative language "works as a communicative model" and its clarity "is a democratic requirement" because, quoting the French thinker Pierre Rosanvallon, "laws must be readable in order to be appropriate for citizens."
Montolío gave several examples of both ineffective administrative communication and commendable milestones, such as the communication of the Mossos d'Esquadra to his Twitter account during the management of the attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils in August 2017. And he recalled that the World Health Organization has emphasized during the current COVID-19 pandemic the need for “clear, concise and consistent information” as “people must have reliable and easy-to-understand indications” especially what affects public health.
