Sarah Marriott is a writer and editor with more than 15 years’ experience of training individuals and organisations to communicate with their customers in plain English.
She established Plain English Ireland with a simple mission: to encourage and support organisations to ditch the jargon and use plain English when they write to their customers.
As an ex-Irish Times journalist, Sarah shares her professional skills, experience and expertise. Since 2005, she’s delivered hundreds of training courses in business writing and helped thousands of people to transform their writing skills.
As a leading proponent of plain English for better business writing, Sarah leads the Plain English team which designs training courses, provides editing services and creates style guides.
Sarah empowers people to write more confidently and successfully at work. She makes course participants feel enthusiastic about writing because she’s so passionate about all its aspects: from punctuation and grammar to avoiding jargon and using language to reinforce brand values.
Sarah has helped many of Ireland’s leading financial services companies, legal firms and public sector agencies to simplify their written business communications. She is equally comfortable with entry-level staff, customer service teams, lawyers, academics, marketing teams, managers and CEOs.
As a journalist with the Irish Times, Sarah was a sub-editor in the features department. She was involved in editing, proofreading and laying out daily features pages. and was seconded to the role of Production Editor of the Weekend
magazine. The skills she developed there are now shared with organisations which want to strengthen their customer communications.
She was also a freelance writer, specialising in health, travel and the environment. As a writer and sub-editor, she understands how to simplify complex messages, by using language and layout to reach target audiences.
Sarah was an excellent lecturer on the MA in Journalism course at the Dublin Institute of Technology. I have also witnessed her carrying out training work for a number of organisations. In her training, she combines enthusiasm with all the necessary knowledge and skills. This means that her students not only gain the tools and techniques they need, but are highly motivated.
She combines long experience in training with a natural flair: within seconds of the start of a course, trainees can see that they’re going to enjoy it and, at the end of the course, they’re enthusiastic and well-armed for all their writing tasks.
David Quin, Swiftwrite (and former course director, MA in Journalism)
Sarah was a fantastic writing coach. Everyone should get an opportunity to work with her! She brought energy and expertise to her coaching sessions with us. She has succeeded in helping my colleagues and myself write professional reports and documents that are clear, concise and well written. I hope I get the chance to work with Sarah again.
Senior Project Manager, experienced delivering complex high-level projects in Ireland and the US
Sarah is an absolute pleasure to work with, and she obtains great results. The work Sarah did for us enabled us to produce clear, effective corporate communications yet still retain our own style. Brilliant.
Annette Tierney, Theatre at Work
