Plain English? Checkmate!

July 2009

Writing well is no simple feat. The psychologist Ronald T Kellogg reports that writing is only slightly easier in mental effort than playing expert chess.

And writing in plain English is perhaps harder still. Why? Because instead of just writing the first words that come into your head, you’re trying to be as clear and concise as possible.

So why bother?

Why plain English?

Plain English isn’t just a way to prevent lawyers and bureaucrats from confusing people. It’s also the smartest way for marketing professionals to get their ideas across. Think about what happens every time you communicate something to a customer. There are two minds at work:

yours, figuring out what to say and how to say it; and
your customer’s, figuring out what you’re trying to say.

A problem most marketers face is that sometimes customers can’t be bothered to do their share of the thinking. They think they can afford to ignore your idea. If they don't get it in an instant, they can just walk away, so that's what they do.

To keep them interested, you need to do a bigger share of the thinking work than they do. You need to take that burden away from them. And the outcome of that process is plain English: your message in a form that is as easy to grasp as possible, and that allows your big ideas to sparkle and get noticed.

Writing in plain English

Here are just a few of the things we aim to do when we write in plain English:

Keep our sentences short
Write “we” instead of “Resonates”, and “you” instead of “our customers”
Write in active voice (e.g. “We will post a new article”), not passive voice (e.g. “A new article will be posted (by us)”)
Use verbs (e.g. “specify”) wherever possible, instead of nouns derived from those verbs (e.g. “specification”)
Avoid jargon, unless we know the audience is comfortable with it

There are plenty of other things that we think about when writing, all of which we have included in a quality control system based on our five Cs. Style and tone aside, you also need to consider who you’re writing for, what they find interesting, why you want to engage them, what you want to say, what media you’re using... We’ll take a look at some of these things in future articles.

To find out more about our copywriting services, contact us.

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