Editors Weekly: What Is Plain Language? Part 5; the Nitty-Gritty

This article was originally published on The Editors’ Weekly , the official blog of the Editors’ Association of Canada .

What Is Plain Language? Part 5: The Nitty-Gritty

This is the fifth and last in a series of articles discussing the basic principles of plain language  by Aaron Dalton.

I offer two half-day workshops: the first is all about the why and then we look at some document-level issues like tone. This is the workshop that I am most passionate about and try to get in front of as many employees as I can. The more mechanical parts that I am going to summarize here are relegated to a second workshop that is still useful and valuable but is not where I want authors to spend too much energy. This is because the editor can fix many sentence-level issues with minimal intervention from the writer. But what the editor can’t do is actually write the document.

By the time a document comes to me, there is limited time, and the project team — who may have been working on the document for many months — has limited energy for back-and-forths. I have to balance many competing interests (see my earlier blog post on this problem ). So what I want authors to spend the most energy doing is drafting the document with empathy. I like to call my teaching efforts “proactive editing.”

But there is an interest in the finer-level mechanics, so I’m happy to teach them. These won’t be new to my fellow editors, and you can find a great deal of material online about any one of them, so I will simply summarize here.

Structure

• Get to the point: Make your document title explicit and use the “inverted pyramid ” approach as much as reasonable for the document as a whole and for each individual section.

• Use descriptive headings: Your table of contents should tell a story. Prefer headings that describe content, not function (e.g., choose “Issues with Pipeline Right-of-Way” over “Problem Definition”).

• Use topic sentences: Each paragraph should have a specific point to make—a purpose. That purpose should be made clear within the first three sentences.

Sentences

• Prefer shorter sentences.

• Keep subject and verb close together.

• Minimize the passivevoice .

• Minimize negative phrases.

Words

• Minimize jargon.

• Prefer shorter words.

• Avoid noun strings (e.g., mineral surface lease renewal application form guide).

• The main action of the sentence should be expressed in the verb. This will naturally eliminate unnecessary nominalizations and lead to using stronger verbs.

Further reading

• The Craft of Research, Fourth Edition  by Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, Joseph M. Williams, Joseph Bizup, and William T. FitzGerald (University of Chicago Press, 2016) [A seminal work on scientific writing specifically, but applicable to any research endeavour.]

• Legal Writing in Plain English, Second Edition: A Text With Exercises  by Bryan A. Garner (University of Chicago Press, 2013) [Good way to get a sense of defensible changes in legal writing.]

• Expectations: Teaching Writing from the Reader’s Perspective  by George D. Gopen (Toronto: Pearson Longman, 2004) [Completely changed the way I teach.]

• Writing for Dollars, Writing to Please: The Case for Plain Language in Business, Government, and Law  by Joseph Kimble (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2012) [Useful, concrete case studies.]

• Stylish Academic Writing  by Helen Sword (Harvard University Press, 2012) [Excellent text for academic writing.]

• Plain Language and Ethical Action: A Dialogic Approach to Technical Content in the 21st Century  by Russell Willerton (New York: Routledge, 2015) [The BUROC framework  and discussion of the ethical implications of plain language.]

Finally, I’ve gathered research, case studies and links to other resources on subjects of interest to editors in my collection “Empirical Research for Editors .”