Many people question what “plain English” means. Some feel strongly that the term suggests basic writing unsuitable for difficult or complex topics.
This may explain why senior people tend to avoid plain English training. They are usually competent writers and prefer not to spend a day on basic skills such as using active voice verbs, personal pronouns and short sentences.
Such plain English training often uses crude contrasts between ancient language and much crisper passages. It’s entertaining, but doesn’t reflect modern business writing.
We cover plain English thoroughly, but also spend plenty of time on more subtle areas. These include deciding why a document needs to be written, whom it’s for, how to use jargon sensibly, and how to avoid abrasiveness, ambiguity and unnecessary detail.
Being clear and a bit imaginative about these areas helps authors create content; strong content helps them structure their material and decide the tone of a document. Much time on courses is spent looking at how real documents can be made much clearer. Some are often from the client organisation so staff can quickly see the relevance of the training.
Complex topics sometimes demand complex language. Further, English is a subtle language with wide resources that help us communicate intelligently and effectively. Worrying about whether our average sentence length is more than 18 words, how many words of more than two syllables we have used, and whether we have broken a rule by having more than one passive voice verb in three lines isn’t going to take us far towards meaningful clarity.
Good, clear language should speak unambiguously and effectively to the reader, but shouldn’t demean the writer. The simple syntax and diction that suit a public leaflet probably won’t be adequate for a lengthy proposal or report. In such documents information, perhaps about technical points, needs to be arranged and expressed using the clearest language for the purpose and the reader. Plain English skills are only a part of achieving true clarity.
