Improve your writing success with plain language

Professional communicators face many challenges, but you can solve some of them using plain language.

No matter who you communicate with, the information you share is specialized—technical, financial or something else—but it’s information most people don’t talk about every day.

Plain language is communication that is so clear, your readers can easily find what they need, understand what they read and act on the information.

Take governments for example: they want us to recycle, pay our taxes, use health care services…actually, the list is endless.

Their subject-matter experts are engineers, accountants and lawyers, doctors and health care administrators and others. These folks speak their own technical language and they have long forgotten how specialized they and their language have become.

Meanwhile, their readers (and YOUR readers) are busy with families, careers, and today’s little anxieties. More than half of them work at jobs where they don’t need to read every day, and they have lost some reading skill. Those who do read every day might read their own specialized language, not yours.

No matter who they are, your readers will appreciate information in easier, more familiar language. The folks in Legal, your neighbour, the people who use that new toaster you invented will read your email, note about the cat, or user manual if they can see that they need the information and will easily understand it.

Make your work a bit easier and more valuable: get to know your readers, learn what they need and how they need it, and write FOR THEM.