Until this year, my friend Pat McGuire was an English tutor at Joliet Junior College in Joliet, Ill. Now, after winning an election last fall, he is treasurer of Will County.

This is good news for Pat, who loves politics and who needed a career change. It's also good news for me, as I see this as longitudinal study I'm calling, "If Writers Ran the Circus."

So far, so good. Pat's first concrete move has been to simplify, consolidate and make more graphically friendly the tax bill Will County sends out. The graphic improvement is the most dramatic, but the language has improved, too.

For example, the old version of the bill said, "Interest is applied at a rate of 1.5% per month after each installment due date."

Pat's form says more directly, "Avoid late payments. 1.5% per month interest is assessed after each due date."

Potentially more profound are some unexpected cultural changes happening at the treasurer's office. An e-mail from Pat yesterday:

"Jan, Deb, and Andrea are three fiftyish women in my office, hard workers who resolutely take their scheduled fifteen-minute breaks. They don't flirt or flatter me; they've seen treasurers come and go. They are among the bulwarks of the office.

"Yesterday I came back to the office from an outside appointment and saw these three taking their afternoon break in the sun at a picnic table outside the building. I intended to merely wave at them and continue into the building. What's worse than the boss ruining your break by stopping by to chat? However, Jan waved me over.

"The three of them had two reference books I'd brought into work, The Elements of Style and Words into Type, plus an old secretary's reference book. They sincerely told me they were pleased to have just found in one of the books an answer to something they had become curious about: When typing a letter, is 'c/o' lower or upper case? Furthermore, Andrea asked me to explain what a gerund is.

"Either they are pulling my leg so hard I can't feel the pain, or we've righted the world a sixteenth of an inch or so."

Pat and I promise to keep you posted as our fledgling study continues.