Imagine two notices on the gate of a community pool. One says: "Pursuant to the implementation of revised operational procedures, patrons are hereby advised that utilization of the facility subsequent to 10:00 p.m. is not permitted." The other says: "The pool closes at 10 p.m." Both carry the same information. Only one can be read in a second by a tired parent holding a towel. This level is about the style that produced the second notice, and why it is harder to write than it looks.
Plain does not mean simple-minded
Plain language advocates describe plain writing, in various wordings, as writing whose words, structure and design let its intended readers find what they need, understand it and use it. Nothing in that description calls for dumbing down. Plain writing can carry complex ideas; what it removes is needless difficulty, not substance. A physicist explaining relativity to the public still has to explain relativity. Plain style simply refuses to pile obstacles of its own on top of the subject's real difficulty.
Two famous champions
In 1918 William Strunk Jr., an English professor at Cornell University, privately printed a short guide for his students called The Elements of Style. Its best known rule is "Omit needless words." Strunk explained: "Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts." He added that this did not require every sentence to be short or every detail to be dropped, but rather that every word do real work.
In 1946 George Orwell published an essay called "Politics and the English Language." He argued that vague, inflated language lets writers avoid thinking and lets officials make harsh facts sound mild. When the bombing of villages is described in abstract, bloodless terms, readers may never picture what is actually happening. Orwell closed with six rules. In paraphrase: avoid worn-out figures of speech you are used to seeing in print; use a short word where a short word will do; cut any word you can cut; prefer the active voice to the passive; choose an everyday English word over a foreign phrase, scientific term or jargon when one exists; and break any of these rules sooner than write something ugly. That last rule matters. Orwell offered guides for thinking, not laws.
Short, familiar, concrete
Plain style favors familiar words over impressive ones: "use" over "utilize," "help" over "facilitate," "about" over "with regard to," "because" over "due to the fact that." It also favors concrete words, which name things a reader can picture, over abstract ones. "Unsafe conditions" is abstract; "a loose railing on the third-floor stairs" is concrete. Concrete language is easier to understand, easier to remember and harder to hide behind.
Nominalizations
One of the most common causes of stiff prose is the nominalization: a verb or adjective turned into a noun. "Decide" becomes "decision," "investigate" becomes "investigation," "careful" becomes "carefulness." Nominalizations are not errors, and some are necessary. Piled up, though, they drain the life from sentences, because the real action gets buried in a noun and a weak verb such as "make," "conduct" or "provide" has to stand in for it. "The committee made a decision" becomes, with the nominalization undone, "The committee decided." "The agency will conduct an investigation of the complaint" becomes "The agency will investigate the complaint." The next level returns to this idea.
Jargon
Jargon is the specialized vocabulary of a field. Among specialists it is efficient: two surgeons do not need a paragraph to explain what "anastomosis" means. Outside the field it becomes a wall. When writing for general readers, replace a technical term or define it the first time it appears. If a term will be used again and again, defining it once is usually better than avoiding it, since readers can then learn it and you can use it freely.
Plain language as public policy
Governments have increasingly treated clarity as a duty rather than a courtesy. In the United States, the Plain Writing Act of 2010 requires federal agencies to write documents for the public clearly, following plain language guidelines. Similar efforts exist in many countries, and an international standard for plain language was published in 2023. The reasoning is democratic. If citizens cannot understand the rules that govern them, the forms they must fill out or the benefits they are owed, the law in practice treats them unequally, favoring those who can pay someone to translate.
Worked example: the pool notice
Return to the pool gate. The original notice uses a nominalization ("implementation"), several inflated words ("pursuant," "utilization," "subsequent to"), the vague phrase "operational procedures" and a passive construction ("is not permitted") that hides who sets the rule. Apply the tools one at a time. Replace the inflated words: "after" for "subsequent to," "use" for "utilization." Ask what the reader actually needs: the closing time, and perhaps the date the rule starts. Cut everything else. The result: "Starting June 1, the pool closes at 10 p.m." Nine words do the work of twenty-four, and nothing a parent needs has been lost. If the rule has a reason worth knowing, such as no lifeguard on duty after ten, one more short sentence can say so. That is plain style at work: not fewer ideas, but fewer obstacles between the reader and the ideas.