Plain Language
Writing so that the intended reader can find, understand, and use the information the first time.
Plain language is writing designed so that the intended audience can find what they need, understand it, and act on it on a first reading. It has a formal definition — ISO 24495-1 — organised around four principles: the reader gets what they need, can easily find it, can easily understand it, and can use it.
It is not simplification and it is not condescension. Technical precision is entirely compatible with it; what plain language removes is the friction that has no informational content — sentences that restate their own structure, hedges that hedge nothing, and abstraction where a concrete noun was available.
The techniques are well established: lead with the conclusion, use the active voice and name who does what, keep sentences to one idea, prefer common words where a common word is exact, and use structure — headings, lists, tables — where prose is doing structural work badly.
Two writing habits are worth naming as failure modes because they are so easy to produce and so tiring to read. Rhetorical triples — three parallel clauses where one would do — sound persuasive and carry a third of the content they appear to. And contrastive definitions — "this is not X, it is Y" — read as insight while asserting nothing testable.
See also8
Hand-picked in the note itself — the neighbours worth reading next.
Naming
Choosing identifiers so the code states its own meaning without commentary.
Method21 connections
Information Architecture
How information is organised, labelled, and navigated so people can find what they need.
Data & Content11 connections
Terminal User Interface
An interface rendered as text in a terminal, and the design conventions that make command-line tools humane.
Graphics & Games10 connections
Code Comment
Prose inside source code, useful only when it records a constraint the code cannot state.
Method9 connections
Linguistic Relativity
The hypothesis that language shapes thought, and the evidence that has narrowed it considerably.
Meaning & Society11 connections
Rent Strike
Tenants collectively withholding rent to force negotiation with a landlord or policymaker.
Meaning & Society8 connections
Typographic Scale
A constrained set of type sizes and their paired line heights and spacing.
Design & Interface10 connections
Accessibility
Designing so that people with disabilities can use a thing, and the standards that make it checkable.
Design & Interface20 connections
Related2
Nearby in the graph rather than deliberately chosen. Looser, sometimes surprising.
Linked from14
Notes elsewhere in the wiki that reach for this one.
- AccessibilityDesign & Interface
Designing so that people with disabilities can use a thing, and the standards that make it checkable.
- Code CommentMethod
Prose inside source code, useful only when it records a constraint the code cannot state.
- Collective ActionMeaning & Society
Coordinated action toward a shared goal, and the free-rider problem that makes it hard.
- Design SystemDesign & Interface
A shared vocabulary of tokens, primitives, and rules that makes independent work converge.
- Information ArchitectureData & Content
How information is organised, labelled, and navigated so people can find what they need.
- Linguistic RelativityMeaning & Society
The hypothesis that language shapes thought, and the evidence that has narrowed it considerably.
- MarkdownData & Content
A plain-text formatting syntax designed to be readable as written, now the default for technical writing.
- NamingMethod
Choosing identifiers so the code states its own meaning without commentary.
- Rent StrikeMeaning & Society
Tenants collectively withholding rent to force negotiation with a landlord or policymaker.
- SubtitlingMeaning & Society
Timed text accompanying video, with conventions that differ deliberately from written prose.
- TaxonomyMeaning & Society
A controlled vocabulary for classifying things, and the choice between hierarchy, facets, and free tagging.
- Terminal User InterfaceGraphics & Games
An interface rendered as text in a terminal, and the design conventions that make command-line tools humane.
- Typographic ScaleDesign & Interface
A constrained set of type sizes and their paired line heights and spacing.
- WikiMeaning & Society
A collection of interlinked pages that anyone with access can edit, named for the Hawaiian word for quick.