Table of Contents

Introduction

Disclaimer

Getting started

What is plain language?

Who is this guide for?

Benefits of plain language

Plain language writing tips

Know your audience

Keep your tone of voice

Use shorter and more common words

Write in an active voice

Avoid idioms and jargon

Separate your information into smaller sections

Put the most important information first

Using Artificial Intelligence tools

Things to consider

How to check results

Forms and registration considerations

Organize your information

Give examples of where to find information

Document design and formatting tips

Headings

Fonts

Contrast

Testing your documents

Paraphrase testing

Task testing

Automated tools

Conclusion

Questions?

Introduction

This guide provides practical advice to help you use plain language in your documents, websites, forms, and other communications. Writing in plain language helps people find, understand, and use information more easily. When information is clear and easy to understand, readers can focus on the message rather than trying to interpret complicated words, jargon, or complex sentence structures. Writing in plain language does not require you to abandon your organization’s unique tone of voice or personality. When applying these tips, focus on what will be most helpful and clear for the people who will use the information.

Disclaimer

This guide is intended to provide advice on how to make your writing more accessible and is not intended as a list of requirements that you must follow. This document will be periodically updated to ensure that any referenced resources are up-to-date. The most current version of this document is available on accessiblesk.saskatchewan.ca.

Getting started

What is plain language?

Plain language is more than just using shorter, simpler words in your writing. It is a writing tool designed to help your audience quickly learn the information that they need to know. In professional settings, there can be an expectation to write in formal and industry-specific language, using technical terms and corporate jargon that you learned through your education and work experiences as a way of proving your knowledge in the field.

Writing in plain language requires a cultural shift to understand that while using insider terms and language can make us feel more included in our workplaces, it also may exclude others from understanding. Sometimes fancy words and phrases are much shorter to use to explain complex topics, but they can create barriers for your audience who are not familiar with them.

Many plain language professionals recommend using language that a student in the eighth grade would be able to understand as the standard for plain language.

Who is this guide for?

This guide is intended to help organizations that provide programs and services to the public. The tips in this guide can help make documents, websites, and other materials more accessible and easier for clients and customers to use.

Benefits of plain language

Writing in plain language can help everyone. Groups of people who can benefit from plain language the most include:

• People with intellectual and/or learning disabilities.
• People with lower literacy skills.
• People who are learning a new language.
• Seniors.

Writing in plain language can also help organizations. When their information is easy to understand, organizations may find that:

• People can find the information they need and use it more easily, which can reduce questions and requests for help.
• Forms and applications are more likely to be completed correctly, which can reduce errors and delays.
• Staff can learn processes and procedures more easily because information is clear and consistent.

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Plain language writing tips

Writing in plain language takes practice. In this section, we have included some simple tips to help you write in plain language and make your documents easier to understand for most readers.

Know your audience

Knowing your audience can help you tailor your writing to their needs and choose the appropriate language to use. Some questions to ask yourself to help you write could include:

• Who is using this document?
• Why is the person reading this document?
• What information will be challenging to understand?
• What information does the reader really need to learn from your document?

Keep your tone of voice

Your organization may have a clearly defined writing style or tone of voice as part of its brand identity. Plain language does not mean making your organization sound cold or generic. When rewriting content in plain language, keep the tone of voice and personality that your audience expects.

When writing, ask yourself:

• Does this sound like our organization?
• Would our audience expect us to communicate this way?
• Have we simplified the language without changing the intended tone?

Plain language and a consistent brand personality work together. Audiences should be able to recognize both the message and the organization delivering it.

Use shorter and more common words

Using shorter and more common words is one of the best ways to make your writing easier to understand. While some complex words might be easier to use to add an extra description or detail, most of the time common words can be used to explain the same things.

Example:

Complex: Formal and academic writing has a tendency to favour the use of complex terms to describe the topics being presented in their discourse.

Simplified: Formal and academic writing uses complex words to make its arguments.

Write in an active voice

Writing in an active voice is a simple way to make your writing more accessible and easier to follow for readers. It creates a consistent way of reading materials that follows a “who did what” pattern that is closer to how people speak in conversations. More formal and academic writing may use a passive voice where an action is described first followed by the person or thing that caused it.

A common example to show the difference between active and passive voice is:

Active: Please fill out the form.

Passive: The form should be filled out.

A good way to test if a sentence is passive is to try and add “by zombies” after the verb. If the sentence still makes sense after adding “by zombies,” it is likely written in the passive voice.

For example:

Active: Please fill out [by Zombies] the form.

Passive: The form should be filled out [by zombies].

Avoid idioms and jargon

We use idioms and jargon a lot when we talk to our coworkers or people with other shared experiences. While using special terms and phrases can help us feel like we belong to a community, they can be confusing to people who are just learning about a topic or are new to a community.

Idioms

Idioms are very common in spoken language, and we often do not realize how much we use them. Examples are: “call it a day,” “better late than never” or “on the ball.” These phrases are common and easy to understand for people who have a lot of experience with the English language, but may be confusing for people who are learning, just learned, or do not use English often.

Idioms also do not translate well to other languages as they are often informed by local cultures and can be used differently in different places. It is better to use the intended meaning of these phrases instead.

Example:

Instead of using the phrase “call it a day,” say that it is time to stop working.

Jargon

Jargon is language that is often used in specific settings like workplaces and academic study areas. Jargon can take the form of phrases, acronyms, or combinations of complex words. Like idioms, jargon can be confusing for people who are not familiar with the specific area that the jargon comes from.

If you can, avoid using jargon and instead use the common word or words that the jargon replaces. Some important questions to ask yourself when thinking about using jargon in your writing are:

• “Will my audience know what this word means?”
• “Do they need to know what this word means?”

If the answer to both questions is “no,” then find a plain language alternative to use.

If you feel that your audience needs to know what a jargon term means, then try to explain the concept in a context that is relevant to your audience. For example, when trying to explain universal design to someone who is new to the disability world, you might write something like this:

“Universal design is a way of making the things we use every day easier to use for as many people as we can, like replacing a doorknob that needs to be grabbed and twisted with a door lever that can be pushed down.”

Separate your information into smaller sections

Looking at a document that has a lot of long paragraphs with very few breaks can be intimidating and frustrating for readers. Long sections of information can make it hard for readers to pick out the information that they are looking for in your document and make it easier to lose track of where they are in a document.

Many readers now scan across a page looking for keywords and important information instead of reading every word line by line. Breaking up your large documents into smaller sections and highlighting important information can help readers find what they need easier.

Some ways that you can break up your information to make it easier for people to find include:

• Headings to show where subjects change (like the ones in this document).
• Shorter paragraphs to provide natural reading breaks and reduce clutter.
• Bulleted or numbered lists (like this one).

Put the most important information first

Putting the most important information at the beginning of your documents is a great way to make your information more accessible for all audiences. It lets people get the information they need quickly without the need to scroll or look through a document to find the things they need the most. This is very helpful for people who may have difficulty reading, experience fatigue or who are simply short on time. This is helpful for any documents that cover safety or emergency information that people need to be able to read and understand quickly.

If your audience is only going to learn one or two things from what they are reading, what do you want those things to be? Try to put that information within the first few sentences of your document. If you must make a longer document that covers multiple topics, consider using headings to break up the information into sections. You can then use this technique in each section to help readers get the information they need.

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Using Artificial Intelligence tools

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing the way people read and write information. As AI progresses, there may be opportunities to use it to make our writing more accessible for the people who need to read it.

Things to consider

AI is being used more often to help us quickly compose our thoughts into writing, create summaries, and adjust tone. AI is constantly being updated and upgraded to do these tasks better. While this technology progresses, some things that you should consider when using AI to write in plain language are:

• Use AI created content as a starting point not as a final product.
• AI programs can only use the information that they have available to write things.
• Sources that AI pulls its information from may be outdated or inaccurate.

How to check results

AI can help you to draft your content, but you should continue to check and make the final edits yourself to make sure that the writing matches the voice and style of your organization. To check the results of your AI-assisted writing you should:

• Check that the content has been written using more common words and less technical jargon.
• Make sure that the writing still has the same meaning and provides the information that you intended.
• Check for any unintended bias in the way information has been written.
• Check that the language is at an appropriate level for your audience.
• Fact check any new information that has been created including examples used to explain complex terms.
• Check that the content is written in an active voice.

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Forms and registration considerations

Almost every organization has forms that need to be filled out by either staff or members of the public. Some examples of forms that your organization might have include:

• Program applications.
• Event registrations.
• Website account registrations.
• Newsletter sign-ups.

Writing the information in these forms in plain language can help both your organization and the people who are filling them out. Forms that are easy to understand can be filled out faster, with less questions, and less mistakes that must be corrected by staff or the person who is filling them out. This section has some helpful tips for you to make your forms easier to understand using plain language and simple designs.

Organize your information

Looking at a form full of continuous questions or with a large paragraph to read before answering questions can be intimidating for readers. Organizing your information and questions in a way that lets people focus on one topic at a time can help improve your form’s readability. Some ways to do this might include separating sections by pages or providing headings for individual sections.

If your form requires people to read any information before responding to a question, it is helpful to place the questions directly after the information they have to respond to.

Give examples of where to find information

Sometimes the information that people need to provide you to qualify for a program is not something that they can easily find. This could include banking information or other tax and financial information, personal identification like birth certificates or photo ID or account and client numbers for other programs.

Giving people examples of the information they are looking for can help them to find the information on their own. An example of this would be showing a picture of a blank cheque with the numbers they need to provide you for direct deposit information highlighted and explained.

If information will have to be requested from a different organization like the applicant’s bank or another government agency, it can be helpful to explain who they will have to contact and what information they will need to ask for. This can help not only the applicant, but the organization being contacted as the request will be clearer for the employee responding to the applicant.

Example:

To find your client number for [organization] you can call their general line at [phone number] and request your client number. You will likely have to provide the employee with two pieces of identification like a health card number and driver's license or photo ID number to confirm your identity.

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Document design and formatting tips

How we design and format our documents can be just as important to making them easier to read. This section provides some starting points related to document accessibility that you can easily make to improve the readability of your documents.

Headings

Headings are useful for any documents, even emails. Headings and sub-headings let readers scan documents for what they are looking for and provide screen readers with places to navigate to in documents.

Most readers do not read an entire document, but scan over the words looking for something useful. Headings and sub-headings guide readers to information. They show readers how the information fits together and provide breaks in the text, making it easier to read.

You can use Styles in Microsoft Word to format different levels of headings and sub-headings for your documents. Formatting your headings and sub-headings can also provide visual cues for people to know when they have reached a new section of information. They can also be used as an easy way to create an automated table of contents in Microsoft Word.

Fonts

Choosing fonts that are clear and readable is a great way to make your documents easier to understand. There is no single font that is accessible for everyone, but some font styles are harder to read and should be avoided, such as:

• Fonts that have letters that are tightly spaced or overlap each other. (Example of tight spacing)
• Fonts that are artistic or designed to look like handwriting. (Example of text that looks like handwriting)
• Fonts that make it hard to tell the difference between the shapes of different letters. (Example: Illustration class starts at 11 – this is the number eleven)
• Some readers prefer Serif fonts which have small curls on each letter, and some prefer Sans Serif fonts that look plainer.
• Examples of Serif fonts with good readability include Times New Roman, Georgia, and Lucida Grande.
• Examples of Sans Serif with good readability include Aptos, Arial, Helvetica, and Verdana.

Choose fonts that are simple and available in the programs you use to make your documents. Try not to use more than two fonts in one document. Using one font for headings and another for text can help readers tell the difference between the two. For general readability, it is best to choose a font size between 12 and 18 points for text and a larger size for titles and headings.

Contrast

Contrast is an important part of both accessibility and marketing. When something becomes difficult to focus on and read, many people will avoid reading it. The best way to make sure that your documents have high levels of contrast is to use dark text on a light background.

The size of your text can also impact the level of contrast. If you want to check the contrast of any of your documents, you can find many free contrast checkers online that will let you test if your colour combinations are accessible.

Below is an example of how text size can impact the accessibility of contrast for text.

• This red text does not pass contrast ratios at size 14 font or below.
• If the text is bolded at size 14 it passes for accessibility.
• If the text is at size 18 it passes for accessibility.

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Testing your documents

The best way to make sure your documents are easy to read is by testing them with other readers. Testing your documents is easy to do but does take a little bit of planning.

Two methods you can use to test your content are paraphrase testing and task testing. Both methods can be done in one-on-one sessions either in person or online. All you need is time to meet.

Having five to six people who can test your documents is best but even one tester can help you improve your document.

Paraphrase testing

Paraphrase testing can help tell you how well your audience might understand your document, website text, or survey questions. It helps you find out if readers are interpreting your writing the way that you mean them to.

To do paraphrase testing, you will choose sections of your writing that you want to test. Give each tester the sections of writing and then follow these steps:

1. Ask the tester to read the sections that you want to test. Sections could be individual sentences or paragraphs.
2. After the tester has read each section, ask them to tell you in their own words what that section means.
3. Take notes, writing down the explanation in the tester’s words. Do not correct them.
4. Also ask specific questions about what works well for them and what does not.
5. Review your notes later and use the tester’s feedback to fix the sections where testers misunderstood the message.
6. Fix the problems and retest if you can.

Task testing

Task testing can help you find out if your document or website is really helping people find the information they need or completing the task they want.

1. Give each tester the document to read just before the test starts.
2. Ask them questions that they should be able to answer from reading the document.
3. Watch them look for the information and take notes where they have trouble or do things you did not expect.
4. Review your notes and plan to fix sections where testers had difficulties finding or interpreting your information.
5. Fix the problems and retest if you can.

The audience you are writing for has your best testers, but feedback from other people can also be useful.

Other potential testers might include:

• People who are familiar with your audience.
• People who do not know the content in your document.

Testing documents with your team or other coworkers while you are writing can also help. It can be the most effective and efficient way to test and should work for lower-stakes documents like website content or a letter to the public about a routine topic.

If you are using team members or other coworkers as testers, do not use:

• People who know all the information in the document.
• People who helped create the document at any point in time.

People in these two groups will know too much about the topic to help you learn what is missing or badly organized.

Automated tools

Readability tools are software, online platforms, or other technology that evaluate your writing to give you a readability score. They do this by analyzing your word choices, sentence length, and structure to provide you with a score that usually relates to a grade level for reading.

Some tools can also provide suggestions to make your writing easier to understand, like recommending simpler word choices and shorter sentences.

Readability tools can help you find out if your writing is getting easier to read, but they cannot replace having human readers check or test your writing.

Readability tools are based on algorithms, and they cannot do some things that are important to help your readers like:

• Identify jargon and technical terms.
• Tell you if you are giving your readers the right information.
• Tell you if you have included enough information.
• Tell you if your information is in a logical order for your readers.

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Conclusion

Writing in plain language can be challenging, especially when you are used to technical terms, jargon, and acronyms. However, it is a valuable skill that makes information clearer and easier to understand. When readers do not have to re-read or seek help, they are more likely to stay engaged and use the information effectively.

This guide offers practical suggestions to help you write and test plain language. If you are just getting started, focus on getting to know your audience and using shorter more common words. These simple steps can make your writing more accessible to more people.

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Questions?

Please contact the Saskatchewan Accessibility Office for more information or to request an alternate format of this guide.

Saskatchewan Accessibility Office

14th Floor, 1920 Broad Street

Regina, SK, S4P 3V6

Phone: 306-787-7283

Toll-free: 1-877-915-7468

Email: accessiblesk@gov.sk.ca