Plainlanguage.gov is a cool resource for anyone trying to write more effectively. An official website of the US government, it lays out guidelines for clear communication in government docs. The site’s federal plain language guidelines could apply to almost any type of writing, including corporate, academic, and journalistic.
There is actually a law, the Plain Writing Act of 2010, that mandates that “federal agencies use clear government communication that the public can understand and use,” per the site.
Here’s Plainlanguage.gov on choosing your words carefully:
Government writing is often stodgy, and full of dry legalisms and jargon. H.W. Fowler summed up these recommendations for making word choices in his influential book, The King’s English, first published in 1906. He encouraged writers to be more simple and direct in their style (quoted in Kimble, 2006):
-Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched.
-Prefer the concrete word to the abstraction.
-Prefer the single word to the circumlocution.
-Prefer the short word to the long.
-Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance word.
The last recommendation was also made by George Orwell in his famous essay, “Politics and the English Language,” published in 1946:
Bad writers, and especially scientific, political and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, sub-aqueous and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon opposite numbers.
Pretentious diction muddies the waters. It also wastes people’s time.
Why write “Experimental Turf Area – Please Avoid Pedestrian Traffic on Turf” when you can get the same message across much better by writing “KEEP OFF THE GRASS”?
Another lesson: avoid passive voice. “More than any other writing technique, using active voice and specifying who is performing an action will change the character of your writing.”
Compare these sentences – which are clearer and have more impact?
There’s much more at the site. I think it’s useful for writers and communicators in general, not just authors of eye-watering federal docs.
Writing is about conveying a message – everything else is secondary. Orwell again: “Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane.”