Plain English

However nice your brochure or website looks, it will not do its job if people give up reading it halfway through because the meaning isn't clear. We're not just talking about unintelligent or uneducated people. Highly educated but very busy people can often be under time pressure. They don't want to have to read a sentence twice to get the sense of it. And then there are the readers whose first language is not English.

Here are ten tips to make sure your message gets through to as many people as possible:

Use active verbs, rather than passive ones ("we will write to you", not "you will be written to").
Change nouns ending in "-ion" to verbs wherever you can (example: instead of "we carried out a reorganisation of our operation" you could say "we reorganised the way we operate").
Never use a long word when a short one will do (in the previous example, you could put "the way we do things" instead of "the way we operate").
Keep sentences short (not more than 27 words).
Use bullet points to make lists clearer.
Address your reader as "you", refer to yourself as "I" and your organisation as "we", rather than using the third person (example: "You will have to pay us a fee", not "the client will be charged a fee by the supplier").
Avoid abbreviations and acronyms. Write them in full every time.
Don't use foreign words and phrases, including Latin ones. Say "for example" instead of "eg" and "in other words" instead of "ie", and so on (not "etc").
Avoid jargon - if you can't avoid using it, explain what it means.
Use an easy to read type face with a strong colour contrast and no less than 11pt type.

It's just a matter of following some simple rules. But if you find all this hard work, why not ask an expert? Rules like these have become second nature to me. It doesn't take me long to go through a piece of text and "translate" it into Plain English. Paying me to do it will set you free to do something you are good at.

You can find out more about Plain English on the Plain English Campaign website.