Plain language guidelines
Adapted and summarized Federal Plain Language guidelines.
- Write for your audience
- To hold someone’s attention, figure out who they are and what they want to know. Tell them why the material is important to them.
- Do your research, address people, address separate audiences separately.
- Organize the information
- Start by stating your purpose and summarize. Lay content out in a logical order, beginning with the most important information. Put background information (when necessary) toward the end.
- Make it easy to follow, add useful headings, have a topic sentence, place the main idea before exceptions and conditions, use transition words, and use lists.
- Choose your words carefully
- Words matter. They are the most basic building blocks of written and spoken communication. Don’t complicate things by using jargon, technical terms, or abbreviations that people won’t understand. Choose your words carefully and be consistent in your writing style.
- From The King’s English:
- Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched.
- Prefer the concrete word to the abstraction.
- Prefer the single word to the circumlocution.
- Prefer the short word to the long.
- Additionally, use simple words and phrases, avoid hidden verbs, avoid noun strings, avoid jargon, minimize abbreviations, minimize definitions, use the same terms consistently, and place words carefully.
- Be concise
- Unnecessary words waste your audience’s time. Great writing is like a conversation. Omit information that the audience doesn’t need to know. This can be difficult as a subject matter expert so it’s important to have someone look at the information from the audience’s perspective.
- Write short sentences; keep the subject, verb, and object close together; use positive language; write short paragraphs; and write short sections.
- Keep it conversational
- Verbs are the fuel of writing. They give your sentences power and direction. They enliven your writing and make it more interesting. Verbs tell your audience what to do. Make sure it’s clear who does what.
- Use active voice, use the present tense, use contractions, use examples, use “must” to indicate requirements, and don’t use slashes.
- Design for reading
- Designing for reading is an important part of developing effective communications. Writing that is legible and well-organized is far easier to understand than more traditional styles.
- Use tables to make complex material easier to understand, consider using visuals, highlight important concepts, and minimize cross-references.
- Follow web standards
- Follow web standards to effectively communicate online, such as recommendations based on usability testing performed by the Nielsen/Norman Group.
- Avoid FAQs, write effective links, repurpose print material for the web, and avoid PDF overload.
- Test your assumptions
- Testing your writing to make sure it’s clear to users can save you time in answering questions later. Start testing as early as you can, whether creating something new or making revisions.
- Paraphrase testing (individual interviews, best for short documents, short web pages, and to test the questions on a survey), usability testing (individual interviews, best for longer documents and websites where finding the right information is important; also best for forms), and controlled comparative studies (large scale studies where you don’t meet the people but you collect statistics on responses).