Plain Writing II: Getting Your Duck/Points in a Row

See the previous post, Plain Writing: Your Audience and Its Goals.

Communicate Clearly

If it’s your business to serve people in a corporate setting, nonprofit, or government agency, it’s vital to communicate clearly. Making yourself understood takes conscious effort. While on first consideration it seems easier to produce a simple declarative sentence than elaborate curlicues of prose, in fact the opposite is often true: Wits throughout the ages have lamented the labor required to be breezy in print.

Clear written communication isn’t defined entirely by the word count, of course. A working group of federal employees developed guidelines for plain language centered on five principles:

• Know your audience.
• Optimize your organization
• Follow the mechanics
• Write for the medium,
• Have a plan for testing your work.

In this installment of our series inspired by the Plain Writing Act of 2010, we’ll investigate some strategies for organizing your project to meet the three metrics that readers should be able to find the information they need, understand what they find, and put the information to use.

Get to the Point

Plain language is actually less about brevity than about front-loading vital information. When we write, as when we speak, there’s often a bit of throat-clearing before we get to the heart of the matter. In an informal essay like this one, that’s fine. But with purely informational prose, it’s best to get straight to business.

If you’ve ever searched for a recipe on a food blog, you know the frustration of scrolling through a dozen paragraphs before getting to the instructions. That extra stuff optimizes the blog for the search algorithm, making the page easier to find on the web even as it makes the recipe harder to find on the page. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a reality of writing for the internet, but there are methods for making SEO text invisible, or at least keeping it from being an impediment to understanding.

Anticipate Your Readers’ Needs

Be thorough but discerning when you choose what to include. Give all the information that’s necessary and nothing that is not. Elmore Leonard’s dictum about fiction, which I’ve quoted many times, “Try to leave out the parts that readers tend to skip,” applies to informational writing.

This mandate flows from the first principle of plain writing, as we discussed last time: Know your audience. Think not only of their reading comprehension level, but of why they’re seeking out this information and how they will use it. The use will determine how you structure the document. (As the modernist architect Louis Sullivan famously wrote, “Form follows function.”)

Chronological vs. Topical Structure

Of the two general types, chronological structure may be the best choice for historical and especially instructional material: step-by-step guides, recipes, how-tos, and the like. Breaking down complex tasks into actionable steps gives the reader a useful checklist to measure their progress as they proceed.

Purely informational text may be better suited to the inverted pyramid structure, with the most important or broadly applicable facts first, proceeding from the general to the specific to the background information. This is the structure used in the US legal code, for instance; the general category of offense is explained followed by the degrees of severity and their individual penalties and exceptions.

Headings as Signposts

If you’re not sure which structure is best, consider outlining your document before you sit down to write. Organizing your words begins with organizing your thoughts, and outlining is an excellent tool for doing so. (But keep in mind some of the common pitfalls that can throw your outline into disarray. Consistency is key.)

When outlining, think deliberately about the headings (topics) that will guide readers through the document; they should be unambiguous and as self-explanatory as possible. Remember, you’re providing a service, and the reader is the client. And while you’d like them to read the entire document, of course, you must account for real-world conditions. Often, a reader will be skimming to find a particular data point, and it’s up to you make that kind of reading possible.

Breaking It Down

For ease of navigation, keep the overall structure simple on both the micro and macro scale. Federal guidelines suggest limiting the document to three levels of headings (I, A, 1). If you find your outline is getting more complex than that, stop and rethink. You may be trying to do too much with a single piece of writing, and the task of a single paragraph might be better served by a separate document.

Say you’re writing orientation materials for a middle school. It might be best to create a student handbook and then another, separate guidebook just for parents, rather than trying to address the needs of both audiences in a single handout.

Likewise, two short, simple paragraphs are almost always better than one long, complicated one. The same holds for individual sentences. Breaking your text into manageable chunks works in harmony with the way the human brain naturally processes text, making it easier to find and extract information.

Talk to People

Finally, and this seems like a small thing, but it has a huge impact: address your words to individuals, not some abstract idea of “users” or “constituents.” That means using the second-person pronoun (you, your). This may require some unlearning on your part, especially if your background is in formal academic writing where it is not customary to acknowledge one’s audience except in the occasional snippy aside (e.g., “the alert reader will doubtless notice”).

But when you’re writing not to address but to serve any audience, the people you’re serving need to feel seen. There should be no condescension, no buddy-biddy jive: just reassurance with your words that you are there to help and instruct.

In two months’ time, we’ll look at the principles of plain writing on a sentence-by-sentence level. See you then!

Jack F.