Plain English is not simplistic English. It is writing that a reader understands on the first pass, without re-reading a sentence to work out which noun was doing what. It can still be precise, technical, and formal when the situation calls for it.

Most wordiness is not a style choice. It is a habit picked up from reports, legal notices, and other people's websites. Habits can be edited out, quickly, once you know what to look for.

Turn nouns back into verbs

The biggest source of fog is the nominalisation: a verb turned into a noun, usually with a suffix. Make a decision instead of decide. Provide assistance instead of help. Conduct an investigation instead of investigate.

These constructions push the action away from the actor and add words that carry no meaning. We will conduct an assessment of your requirements becomes we will assess what you need. Same information, half the length, and now someone is doing something.

Scan for endings such as -tion, -ment, -ance, -ency, and -isation. Not every one needs changing, but a paragraph with four of them usually has a problem.

Cut the hedges and the throat-clearing

Hedges soften a sentence until it stops saying anything. It may be worth considering whether it would be appropriate to review the policy. Someone is avoiding the point. Write: we should review the policy in June.

Throat-clearing is the sentence before the sentence. In order to ensure that, it is important to note that, as previously mentioned. Delete the first clause and see whether the meaning survives. It usually does.

Keep hedges that carry real uncertainty. We expect the part by Friday is honest. It may potentially be the case that the part could arrive is just noise around the same fact.

Vary sentence length instead of shortening everything

Some advice says keep every sentence under twenty words. Followed literally, that produces a choppy page that is hard to read and sounds like a manual for children.

The better rule is variety. A short sentence lands a point. A longer one can carry a qualification, a condition, or a sequence of events that belongs together. Read the paragraph aloud and listen for monotony. If every sentence has the same shape, the reader will lose the rhythm even if the grammar is perfect.

Keep the words your reader uses

Plain English does not mean replacing every specialist term with a general one. If your customers say remittance, say remittance. If they say settlement date, do not substitute payment day because it sounds friendlier.

The test is whether the reader knows the word. A term that is standard in their trade is clearer than a paraphrase they have to translate. A term that only your internal team uses should be replaced or explained once.

Plain English is not about using smaller words. It is about removing the distance between the writer and the reader.

Prefer the active voice, but not always

Active sentences are easier to follow because someone does something. The team moved the launch to May. Passive sentences hide the actor: the launch was moved to May. Sometimes that hiding is honest, or the actor is unknown, or the object matters more than the person.

Do not turn this into a rule with no exceptions. Use the active voice by default, and use the passive when it is genuinely the better sentence. What matters is that the reader can tell who did what.

Test it on someone who was not there

Give the draft to a colleague outside the project and ask them to explain it back to you. Where they hesitate, the writing is unclear. Where they ask a question the text should have answered, something is missing.

This is faster than any checklist and catches problems that grammar tools miss, because it tests comprehension rather than correctness.

If a second reader is not available, the readability checker returns Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid grade and Gunning Fog for any draft, with the sentences that pull the score down. The readability benchmark explains what a score means in practice, and where the method stops being useful.

Edit in passes

Do not try to fix everything at once. First pass: structure, so the argument is in the right order. Second: sentences, cutting nominalisations and hedges. Third: words, checking that each one is the one you mean. Fourth: read aloud.

Four short passes beat one long struggle, and the third pass is where most of the improvement happens.

  • Verbs restored where nouns took over
  • Hedges removed unless the uncertainty is real
  • Opening clauses deleted
  • Sentence length varied, not flattened
  • Reader's own terms kept
  • Active voice by default
  • Comprehension tested on a colleague
  • Draft read aloud once

Plain writing is not a talent. It is a series of small deletions, made in a consistent order, until the page says what it means and stops there.