The importance of plain language in fiction

Sep 9, 2024 | News, Writing | 0 comments

My Dad aka Ludwig Werner and I having fun disputing word choice, with our mouths full, picnicking on route from Auckland to Wanaka in New Zealand

How important is plain language in fiction? Here two frontrunners in promoting the new Plain Language Standard discuss the pros and cons blah balh

My dear old Dad loved language. Besides Dutch, he was fluent in 15 other tongues, from Hindi to Hungarian. But his all-time favorite was hifalutin English. He loved using English, so rich compared to Dutch (EN = 755,000 vs. NL = 400,000 headwords; estimates vary) and he never missed a chance to show off in his stories. Given the choice between a complex word or its easy equivalent, he’d often plump for the polysyllabic. When we read each other’s stories, he and I often bickered over word choice. He’d expound while I’d explain—he’d pontificate while I’d hold forth—and never our twain did meet (sorry Rudyard). Stubbornly, I believed then (still do) that the point of writing is to reach your reader: communication is not what you give, but what they get. Fair enough, dear old Dad was into self-expression and didn’t mind confusing readers (me). Still, my wordy raps with him explain why I love plain language.

This also explains why I like the plain language items posted by Gael Spivak and Greg Ioannou in the Editors’ Association of Earth (EAE),  a community of practice on Facebook (14K members) that Greg co-founded with the aim of fostering links between editors. Greg and Gael are EAE moderators.

Both former presidents of Editors Canada (which Greg also co-founded), Gael and Greg are working with the International Plain Language Federation (IPLF) on developing and promoting a new standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO):  Plain Language, Part 1: Governing principles and guidelines.


“A communication is in plain language if its wording, structure, and design are so clear that the intended readers can easily find what they need, understand what they find, and use that information.” 

ISO describes standards as “the distilled wisdom of people with expertise in their subject matter and who know the needs of the organizations they represent.” Standards are “a formula that describes the best way of doing something.” The plain language standard has four principles and each section of the standard gives details on what methods you can use to write a plain language document:

  • Readers get what they need (relevant)
  • Readers can easily find what they need (findable)
  • Readers can easily understand what they find (understandable)
  • Readers can easily use the information (usable)

Well, that sounds clear enough. But (to risk asking the obvious) why are these four principles so important? Gael has the answer. “Because everyone has the right to understand what they’re reading. This is especially true for people interacting with the law or with governments. Beverly McLachlin, former chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, said this, ‘If we cannot understand our rights, we have no rights.’”

Gael Spivak likes to collect things, including squirrels, tiny books, and articles on the singular they. She is the IPLF Chair, Standard localization and implementation committee

Government requirements
Gael works for the Government of Canada, where she specializes in plain language writing and editing. “It saves so much time and money if people can understand what they’re expected to do. In terms of government requirements, using plain language means compliance increases and mistakes decrease. There’s also a drop in letters, emails and phone calls asking what the requirements mean. Government employees have a responsibility to wisely manage tax dollars.” She adds, “I’m a civil servant, so I see plain language as part of my job.”

Gael has spent years reading about plain language techniques and then applying them to her writing and editing. “I’ve gotten better at it over time, as you’d expect. Interacting with fellow plain language practitioners, in our communities of practice and through volunteer work, has also taught me a lot about plain language.”

Greg is President of Colborne Communications and Iguana Books, and teaches plain language workshops. He’s been teaching corporate and government clients since 1991 but his association with plain language goes back to 1984, when the Ontario Ministry of Finance invited him to edit the provincial budget on pension policy reform for different audiences: pensioners, so that they could understand it, and the people administering corporate pensions so that they would have the information they needed. Greg remembers, “The editorial meetings at the ministry was where I learned a lot of the basic techniques.”

Greg Ioannou captains a trivia league team and has been known to frequent local pubs and stamp auctions. He is a member of the IPLF Certification committee and the IPLF Standard localization and  implementation committee

Government gigs
That first contract led to a sequence of Ontario government gigs for Greg, which gave him the experience needed to land a contract with the Ontario Insurance Commission (OIC) that wanted to rework their communications in plain language, from the recordings on their telephone system to their brochures and their complex application forms. Part of the job was training their staff (from the receptionists to the director and the commissioner) in plain language writing.

Greg:I looked at those 1991 workshop handouts recently, and was surprised to see that they almost exactly match the approach that’s used in the new plain language standard. Of course, I immediately assumed I was brilliant and wildly prescient. A couple of weeks later, I realized what was actually happening. OIC in 1991 used WordPerfect, not Word. And WordPerfect didn’t provide the user with readability statistics. Having a handy tool to supposedly measure how easy your document was to read largely changed how we wrote in plain language.”

Fast forward to 2006, and Greg landed a major plain language contract to rethink and update the City of Toronto’s document preparation methods. “The City still uses the templates and techniques we introduced then, and I smile when I get communications from the City that still use those templates.” With a grin he adds, “Well, maybe I don’t smile so much when I get tax bills.”

Readability statistics
Part of that contract was teaching plain language to everyone who wrote for the City. “Those 2006 workshops focus on how to use the new templates and Word’s readability statistics to produce clear docs. However,” Greg points out, “people overused, misunderstood and misused readability statistics, so the standard does not even mention their use. This is why the standard is more like the workshops we gave before the statistics were available to writers.”

Plain language can benefit writers of fiction too

Gael picks up the thread. “There’s no formula or trick that will make a document plain. Not even the free readability formulas you can find online these days. Running your document through a readability formula will not make the text meet the readers’ needs. These programs have no way to even assess what readers’ needs are. And readability formulas have been shown to undermine proven plain language techniques.” Gael summarized some of the research on this in her blog post Readability formulas, programs and tools: Do they work for plain language?

Fiction writers can benefit from plain language

Although the focus of the standard seems to be on corporate communications, Greg thinks that fiction writers can benefit from it too. “Fiction is more effective when it keeps the readers’ needs and interests in mind. The least effective fiction is written to entertain the writer, not the readers. I started teaching fiction editing in 1990. And the plain language workshops and fiction workshops kind of cross-pollinated. Corporate communications can be more effective when the writing is engaging and tells a story.”

Getting back to the basic principles, but applying them now to fiction writing:

  • Readers get what they need (entertainment)
  • Readers can easily find what they need (not usually relevant)
  • Readers can easily understand what they find (except in some literary stuff)
  • Readers can easily use the information (it keeps them engaged!)

Greg continues, “So you try to catch the reader’s interest immediately and keep them engrossed. If there’s relatively boring background information you have to put in the writing, hold it back until the reader is sure that the writing is entertaining—and make the background information as entertaining as you can. Write to the reader using the reader’s own vocabulary. And so on.”

So, it doesn’t matter whether the writing is a corporate communication or a work of fiction? Greg nods. “If you’re writing a romantic mystery novel, make sure the mystery and the romance are presented effectively, and don’t put in too many elements that wouldn’t normally be found in that genre. Meet the readers’ needs.”

Gael agrees. “The standard really emphasizes putting readers’ needs first, as well as paying attention to ethics and applying information design techniques. It is also language neutral, so its core concepts will work in almost any language.”

“In sum,” says Greg, “applying the four principles of the new standard will have you rethinking how you work. This makes it a useful tool to quickly assess your work against, making sure you haven’t forgotten any of the dozens of steps you need to go through when writing or editing a document.”

Gael and Greg became plain language experts through practice. “There is no hack for plain language,” Gael concludes. “You have to put in the work. You have to think about the readers’ needs and how to present information to meet those needs. But the ISO plain language standard tells you exactly how to do that.”

Further reading

Learn more

Free webinar on Plain Language and Editors on the Editors Canada channel on YouTube tells you how to use the core concepts and principles of this approach to plain language in your writing, and in structural and stylistic editing work.

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