Question 1

1. We spoke about Plain English writing in class. Please answer the following in detail:  

a. How would you explain to someone what “Plain English writing” is? (3 Marks)  

Essentially plain writing is a form of writing made to be easily understood and straightforward. The goal of plain language writing is to communicate with your audience in a way that’s clear, unbloated and informative. This is done using a variety of techniques such as writing at a grade 7/8 reading level, using words and language that the audience is familiar with and condensing the length of your writing to only what helps get the information understood with no misunderstandings. 

b. What makes plain English writing different? (4 Marks)  

Plain language writing loosely follows a set of techniques that when used correctly helps you write your information in a way that is clear, concise and understandable to the audience. Here are some of the techniques used in this writing style: 

First is conciseness, if there is too much text it may lead readers to struggle to find the information they are looking for or may even broaden and cloud the actually important information. 

Next is the use of an active tone instead of passive one. Using this tone not only conveys more action and momentum but also makes it clear who exactly is doing the action. 

Writing at a grade 7/8 reading level is also recommended for plain English writing as it is more likely to be understood by a wider audience of readers. 

Formatting and the F pattern are widely used in plain English writing. Utilizing bullets and lists to simply and condense information can be crucial for this style of writing. Writing in the F pattern also optimizes your copy so that it is easily scannable by the reader, this way they have the ability to find the information they need and skip over what they do not. 

Using these techniques as well as others will help writers write in plain English writing to make their copy as optimized as possible. However, it should be noted that none of these should be followed as absolute rules, it may sometimes be appropriate to not follow them depending on the situation. 

c. What is plain language writing for the web and in detail and in your own words, why is it important? (4 Marks) 

Plain language writing for web copy utilizes the same techniques as normal plain language writing but is changed in ways that benefit web copy. Firstly, it’s important to understand why plain language writing is important. Online users go to a webpage with a purpose and if they cannot find what they are looking for quickly they are likely to leave and try another site, as stated in the class PowerPoint users will often decide within 15 seconds if they are going to engage with a page or to leave. That makes it crucial to provide the user with the relevant information as quickly and clearly as possible while still being informative and engaging.  

The F pattern is heavily used in web plain language copy, this makes it intuitive for the reader to scan the information on your page to decide if it’s relevant or not. It is also important to organize your information in order of importance and relevance, for example, the most important info should be at the very top of that page. That is why for the web a writer may put the important information bolded right in the header of the copy, and then expand with more details as the copy goes on, this gets the reader’s attention, answers their question/purpose and if needed provides more information as needed.