Plain english writing is a form of writing that involves making sure the content in your writing is concise, digestible and easy to read for your audience, this doesn’t mean you’re “dumbing down” your writing but instead your making it so that the writing is easy to understand for anyone at any reading level, one of the different techniques that you’d use if you were practicing plain language writing is not using long, “fancy” words, for example, if I were writing a paragraph and it included the sentence, “Jimmy had to utilize his writing skills to persuade the reader to resume reading the novel” that may not be easy to read for someone with a lower reading level and would have to be revised using plain language writing to be something more like “Jimmy had to use his writing skills to get the reader to keep on reading the book”, as you can see the revised sentence doesn’t try to use long words and instead uses more common and easier to understand words that regular people would hear while they are talking in real life.
However, plain language writing isn’t just about the words that you use in your writing but is also how you structure your content within the writing as well, like if you are writing in plain english, you want the content to be easily understandable and easy to read, this involves not writing in long, run on sentences and trying to get your point across in short, digestible sentences that the reader can read quickly or even give them the ability to scan through the reading and be able to get the content that way, using visuals is also another way that you can make the content as easy to read as possible, like infographics are a perfect way to give all the important information and make it so readers understand it in a clear way.
That’s ultimately the main purpose of writing in plain language, making sure anyone can understand what you’re writing is absolutely crucial when you’re writing especially for a business, one of the main culprits of writing in complicated and hard to understand ways in the business landscape are tech companies (computer hardware to be more specific), they will list off all of these specs and features that a tech product may include in a way that only the developer or someone who is educated in tech would understand
This is a perfect example from the Alienware website advertising one of its new computer products, now while someone who is highly educated in computers may understand all of these terms, me being someone who only has a loose understanding of computers and the tech and specs they use has no idea what most of this stuff even means or how it will value me and will push me away from even engaging with the product because I don’t understand these terms and I don’t know how they would be of value to me if I were to buy this product.
Class slideshow sources
Briscoe, W8 – Plain Language Writing Quick Recap (W26) slide 8
Briscoe, Plain Language Writing w26, slide 17