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 — organized 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. A title phrased as a question is the same evasion at the top of a page, stating no conclusion at all, which is why Betteridge's Law of Headlines can answer most of them "no" without opening the story.
See also11
Code Comment
Prose inside source code, useful only when it records a constraint the code cannot state.
Method11 connections
Naming
Choosing identifiers so the code states its own meaning without commentary.
Method59 connections
Information Architecture
How information is organized, labeled, and navigated so people can find what they need.
Data & Content17 connections
Terminal User Interface
An interface rendered as text in a terminal, and the design conventions that make command-line tools humane.
Graphics & Rendering16 connections
Linguistic Relativity
The hypothesis that language shapes thought, and the evidence that has narrowed it considerably.
Meaning & Society17 connections
Rent Strike
Tenants collectively withholding rent to force negotiation with a landlord or policymaker.
Meaning & Society9 connections
Typographic Scale
A constrained set of type sizes and their paired line heights and spacing.
Design & Interface17 connections
Accessibility
Designing so that people with disabilities can use a thing, and the standards that make it checkable.
Design & Interface44 connections
Collective Action
Coordinated action toward a shared goal, and the free-rider problem that makes it hard.
Meaning & Society23 connections
Markdown
A plain-text formatting syntax designed to be readable as written, now the default for technical writing.
Data & Content14 connections
Jargon
The specialized vocabulary of a profession or group, which lets insiders speak precisely and quickly while marking who belongs, and which becomes a barrier when used on people who don't share it.
Meaning & Society5 connections
Linked from27
- 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.
- Cunningham's LawMeaning & Society
The observation that posting a wrong answer online gets a faster correction than asking a question.
- Design SystemDesign & Interface
A shared vocabulary of tokens, primitives, and rules that makes independent work converge.
- Folk EtymologyMeaning & Society
Words reshaped to resemble familiar parts, and the false origin stories that reshaping invites.
- Gacha MonetizationPlay & Games
Selling randomized draws rather than items, and the structures that make the real price hard to see.
- Information ArchitectureData & Content
How information is organized, labeled, and navigated so people can find what they need.
- JargonMeaning & Society
The specialized vocabulary of a profession or group, which lets insiders speak precisely and quickly while marking who belongs, and which becomes a barrier when used on people who don't share it.
- LegibilityMeaning & Society
Making a system countable and administrable, at the cost of the local knowledge that made it work.
- Linguistic RelativityMeaning & Society
The hypothesis that language shapes thought, and the evidence that has narrowed it considerably.
- MalaphorMeaning & Society
A blend of two idioms into a third, and the family of errors that reveals how fixed phrases are stored.
- MarkdownData & Content
A plain-text formatting syntax designed to be readable as written, now the default for technical writing.
- Metasyntactic VariableMethod
a placeholder identifier chosen to carry no meaning of its own.
- Modern Monetary TheoryMeaning & Society
A macroeconomic account holding that a currency issuer is constrained by real resources and inflation rather than by revenue.
- MonadComputation & Algorithms
A wrapper type with a way to lift a value in and a way to chain functions that return more wrappers.
- NamingMethod
Choosing identifiers so the code states its own meaning without commentary.
- Percentage PointMethod
The unit of an absolute change in a percentage, and the gap between that and a relative change.
- Prototype TheoryMeaning & Society
Categories are organized as graded resemblance to a best example rather than defined by necessary and sufficient conditions.
- Rent StrikeMeaning & Society
Tenants collectively withholding rent to force negotiation with a landlord or policymaker.
- Retronasal OlfactionBody & Medicine
Most of what is called taste is smell arriving at the receptors from the back of the mouth.
- Specific Absorption RateMatter & Energy
The rate at which tissue absorbs radiofrequency energy, measured in watts per kilogram.
- 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 & Rendering
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.