How to make your writing simple and understandable
Writing for the general public means leaving certain notions behind
If you’ve ever had to explain a complicated subject to the general public, whether it’s about your own work or a report on someone else’s, you know how difficult it can be to put it down in terms the average person would understand.
Reporters face this every day. So do communicators in the government, technology, legal and scientific arenas. Hell, any industry has its own language, its own set of widely understood principles, and enough people to nit-pick a sentence to death that taking a complex idea and making it comprehensible to the public can be so frustrating that you give up and head out for a strong drink.
Having worked in communications in government agencies with engineering-heavy workforces, I feel your pain.
It’s tough. But it is possible.
It takes some work, and there are a few things you need to make sure you do, but you can make complicated subjects understood by people outside your industry.
Why is it important?
Why should you care if the general public can understand your idea or your work? What bearing does that have on your life?
Well, if you’re a communicator, your client or employer likely wants to spread understanding of what they do for a number of reasons: for social proof, to acquire funding, to sell more, to increase trust, to ensure that people who will be affected by a project understand what it is and why it’s being done.
To help your writing do those things, you need to carve away the excess. Paring down helps you focus on your message. It’s easy to write flowery or complicated content if you don’t really know what you’re trying to say. Write simply and your message must be clear.
It’s also important to ensure that misinformation doesn’t spread. If people don’t understand your idea or what it is you’re doing, they’re more likely to fill in the information gaps with their own ideas, based on their own experiences. This is how rumors get started, and once a rumor is circulating, your communications efforts get a lot tougher.
And if something is affecting someone’s life, either through a project your organization is working on or through something you’d like to sell to somebody, people need to understand what it means to them. Will it make them safer? Make their lives easier? How? Why should they care?
If you can’t communicate in a way that people understand, there’s no point in communicating at all.
There’s no such thing as “dumbing it down.”
It’s important for people to understand what you or your client or agency is saying. But there’s often resistance, because people don’t want their work or ideas “dumbed down.”
Let me first just take issue with this idea.
It is insulting.
It assumes that explaining something simply and understandably means you’re writing for an audience that, because they don’t understand your convoluted jargon and properly admire your complex genius, doesn’t deserve to understand the concept at all.
But say you’re an engineer. You’re smart, and you have your own precise vocabulary you use when explaining your concepts. Let’s pretend that you’ve got to have surgery and you know about as much about the human body as the average non-doctor. Would it be “dumbing it down” to explain the surgery to you in terms you understand?
No. In case you have to think too hard about that, the answer is no. How frustrating would it be if the literature explained the surgery in terms only another doctor could understand? You better believe that if someone is going to be cutting you open, you want to understand that surgery as well as you can, in language that makes sense to you and your frame of reference.
We live in a democratic society. Anyone can and should be able to understand ideas, especially if they’re coming from the government. It’s so important, in fact, that the federal government passed an act requiring it. https://www.plainlanguage.gov/ See? You’re bound by law, sort of.
OK, so now that we aren’t referring to simplifying your writing as “dumbing it down,” we can move on to how to simplify your writing while preserving accuracy.
Skip the big words.
I’m sure your vocabulary is impressive. I imagine few in the world can equal your ability to spell. No doubt your turn of phrase can throw an audience into raptures.
Now that we’ve acknowledged your linguistic superiority, let’s set ego aside and talk like regular people.
Big words generally aren’t any more accurate that normal-sized words, and writers often throw them in to show off. But instead of getting your point across, they serve to alienate, frustrate and make sure that whoever was reading your content will toss it aside for something less pretentious.
It’s difficult enough to get eyeballs on your writing. Once you do, you want to keep them there for as long as possible. So if you’re serious about making sure people understand what you have to say, use everyday language and straightforward sentence construction.
Does that sound boring?
I promise, you can make regular words and sentences interesting. Vary sentence length. Think of your writing as a musical composition and establish rhythm. Don’t just write your words; hear them. Read your writing out loud and really listen to it. You’ll hear places you can make changes to construction, inflection and emphasis to make it interesting.
Look at Hemingway; he wrote whole, fascinating novels using simple language. Be like Hemingway.
Write for your grandma (or for my grandma).
There are a few ways to test out whether your content will make sense to anyone else. A former colleague of mine called it the “barstool test,” where he said one good way of knowing how to tell a story is to imagine meeting your buddy in a bar and explaining it to him or her.
Another colleague of mine once encouraged her staff to write as if they were explaining concepts to their grandma. Using our pretend-engineer scenario from above, if you’re an engineer and your grandma was an engineer, that may not work.
If that’s the case, explain it to my grandma. She was not an engineer. She was a mother of four, and a smart, kind, creative, curious lady who lived through some tough times and had little time to spend trying to decipher dense, convoluted writing.
That should be a good starting point for you when trying to explain something to the general public.
And if you’re going to explain something to the general public, you need to …
Make sure you know your subject.
“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
— attributed to Albert Einstein
I have discovered the truth of this quote in my own writing. When I don’t really understand something, it becomes difficult to write about, and extremely difficult to write about it simply.
I think that understanding your subject is one cure for writer’s block. Once you have a good grasp of it, you have a better idea of where to start and how to progress. You can also explain it in a way that makes sense to others.
But it takes a lot of research. This is where you need to do most of the work for your writing, particularly if it’s non-fiction.
It can be the fun part if you approach it with the right mindset. Be curious. Play reporter. Ask questions. Follow threads until they run out. Then, if you’re talking to someone, tell them how you understand the subject, and ask them if you’ve got it right.
While most of the information you gather at this stage isn’t likely to make it into your content, it’s important in understanding the order to write in, your ability to answer questions on your content, and in establishing authority in your writing.
Know your audience.
Sometimes it’s appropriate to use the terminology of your industry. Other times … not so much.
I once got an e-mail from a civil engineer that referenced the “coefficient of friction.” I am not an engineer, and that term meant nothing to me. I wasn’t his audience.
When I expressed my confusion, he explained what he was talking about in plain terms, and I got it. Know who your content is intended for. It’ll make a world of difference in how you approach your writing.
Run it through Read-able.com.
Sometimes, it’s difficult to tell how you’re doing. Is it simple enough? Will people understand?
You can ask friends or an editor to look over your work to help you gauge your progress, but there are also online tools to help you.
I like to cut and paste my writing into read-able.com from time to time. This site evaluates your text and gives you a number, on a variety of scales, representing how easy your content is to comprehend.
I use the Flesch Reading Ease scale, a 0–100 scale with 0 being incomprehensible and 100 being able to be understood by those whose first language isn’t English.
The general idea is a score of 80–100 is easy to understand by just about everybody; a score of 60–80 is good for the general public; a score of 40–60 is geared toward college-educated professionals; a score of 30–40 indicates your writing would be understood by professionals in your specific industry; and a score of less than 30 means you should rewrite.
Aim for a score of 70 or higher. Sometimes it might take a few tries, but it can be kind of like a game, where you try to beat your previous score.
Pro Tip: If you want to increase your score, cut out jargon. People don’t want to learn new vocabulary that they’ll never use again. If you’re going to introduce a concept or term, explain it RIGHT THERE, and, if it’s a long article, explain it again, briefly, when you bring it up later. It’s not people’s job to learn your industry-speak, so try to avoid it wherever possible.
And for the love of all that is holy, please, PLEASE avoid acronyms.
Remember, it’s not about you.
Communicating effectively is not about how you want to say something, it’s about the best way for others to understand you.
It can be a challenge at first, but set aside your desires and adopt a willingness to serve your audience, and you’ll find writing simply and effectively will be much easier.
If this topic resonates with you, please comment, clap or share so others will see it. Spread the writing love!
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