a. How would you explain to someone what “Plain English writing” is? (4 Marks)
In the most simple way to describe what plain writing is, it’s taking the time to understand who our audience is, what they already know, and what they need to know so we can effectively write content that aligns with them and content that they also can understand with no confusion. We need to find out what our audience needs, make sure they understand the writing and use it to fulfil their purpose. Plain writing helps readers quickly and easily understand what we are saying. This does not mean dumbing down our written content, but respecting our readers’ time by not making them read a novel. It’s all about writing as though readers matter. (W8, Briscoe, Plain Language Writing, W25, slide #15).
Plain language is important because everyone reads with different degrees of literacy, and people don’t always read carefully, have a cognitive language, or have visual disabilities. Carefully writing content that you know will make sense to our audience is super important, but we cannot do this without getting to know everything about the audience first! We must use plain language that we know for a fact our audience will understand and have no problem taking in the information.
(W8, Briscoe, Plain Language Writing, W25-slides #18,21,29,62)