The dirty secret about plain English
Writing well is a useful skill. It means you’re more likely to get your point across. Most people want to do it (or think they are) but it’s a hard skill to transfer.
How do you know if your writing is good?
A lot of governments now recommend a plain English rating of Year 4 or Year 8 at the most. But how do you do it?
The most common way of checking plain English is using the Flesch-Kincaid scale (it’s built into Word now).
The formula is based on:
- total words divided by total sentences
- total syllables divided by total words
We refer people to the Hemingway app because it gives useful guidance on:
- length of sentence
- passive tense
- words that can be removed or simplified
Both these measuring tools have reading ages but will give you different results as they’re measuring different things.
The beauty of Hemingway is it’s free and available to everyone (no licences and setup blockers). It gives instant visual cues so people can see where the problem areas are. If you’re in an editor role this means the problems are being solved before they come to you. If you’re in a large organisation it gives you something to show people when they say it shouldn’t be changed.
So what do you do to get plain English?
For us having a process has been more important than having a benchmark score.
Our process:
- have a purpose to your writing: start with testing or research so your writing is for a real person. This is your best way of making sure your content is clear and understandable. At the very least you should start with the most important information and finish with the least in a newspaper style. The research doesn’t always have to be in depth. For this post I put 2 blog titles in our work slack channel and asked people to put a thumbs up next to the 1 they would click on. I also wrote it because people kept asking me about the topic
- look at Google Trends and ‘Searches related to’ at the bottom of Google to make sure you’re using words that other people use. It will also help you solve problems
- write with sub-headings, use of bulleted lists and keep paragraphs short (3 to 4 sentences) to make your content easy to read and understand
- check your sentence length. Sentences should be 20 words or less. If you have more than 1 ‘and’ in a sentence break it into 2. If you have lots of commas, make it a bulleted list
- use active voice. Hemingway recommends 2 or less uses of passive voice. 10% or less is also a common benchmark. The easiest way to do this is start with ‘You’ or ‘We’ (subject-verb-object sentences)
- check for ‘banned words’ from the Gov.au Content Guide. For us this is a manual check by authors and publishers as well as an automated check through a tool we use called Monsido
Choose the right words, not the shortest ones
There’s a common fear of getting it wrong when we simplify language. Particularly with technical language, people can worry the meaning will change or the existing audience will get confused. A good writer doesn’t want either of those things and it’s important to say so.
If you’re wanting to encourage good writing emphasise the process not the measure. Collaboration and support will get you further than rules any day of the week.
A good example of a word that we’ve kept that is quite complex is ‘ancestral remains’. We use it when talking about Aboriginal heritage. You could call them ‘old bones’. Without real world context and to get a good plain English score, that’s a great substitute. It’s also pretty insensitive and it’s not what people use in real life. Compare the results for ancestral remains versus old bones at the bottom of search results in Google.
We encourage people to check Google to see if people are actually using the technical language. If people are typing in ‘What is…’ that means the term isn’t understood. It can still be included if necessary but it needs to be explained.
Don’t lose the emotion
We encourage quotes and content that help people connect with the emotional side of the content. Our research and user feedback tells us even government audiences are feeling emotional and want us to acknowledge that. If you have a quote that really tells a story, it’s okay to break the rules. If you’re writing as yourself, it’s okay to show your personality.
The improvement is important, not the score
We still recommend a rating of Year 8. But it’s not a simple case of pass or fail. What is more important is going through the process with an open mind and a willingness to improve. We want all our content to achieve its personal best score. Like kids in a classroom, the important thing is that each piece of content is the best version of itself that it can be.
We outline this in our editorial guidelines on plain English.
What rating did this article get?
Hemingway gave it Year 5.
Flesch-Kincaid gave it Year 7.
