The Plea for Plain (English) - clear, brief, crisp, bu...zzword-free

An East European friend and I were chatting over dinner recently about her new job. It's in an unfamiliar field, government-related, dense with jargon, acronyms and buzzwords.

She thought her English language skills weren't up to the task. Frustrated, she was giving herself a pretty hard time about it.

"I often wish more people knew fewer words in English," I joked. "It would improve communication pretty much across the board!"

We went on to talk about the virtues of Plain English: writing what you mean with brevity and clarity. Communicating to include and promote understanding. 

Not inflating your own importance using exclusive in-group language and acronyms. 

Not hiding your ignorance behind weasel-words.

Buzzword Alert!

I suggested her status as an English second-language speaker in fact gives her two advantages. 

It encourages her to use clear and simple language.

Best of all, it gives her permission to ask "naive" questions when she doesn't understand what someone's trying to say.

If it's a legitimate and necessary technical term, well she's new and it's part of the learning process to get to know these things. 

If the person cannot explain what they mean by the words they use, there's a good chance that you're not the only person in the room who'd like to know what the speaker really means.

This is even more true of writing. 

Spoken communication includes body language and other delivery cues that writing lacks. (If you've ever taken an email/SMS the wrong way, you know there definitely should be a sarcasm font!)

Plus most of the time you can't ask the author to explain what they've written. 

When you DO need to, that's just Plain bad writing.

A handy tool to assess your own writing is the Hemingway app. It's a great measure of clarity, simplicity and required reader level. 

And since you're likely wondering, here's its assessment of this piece:

Happy Hemingway-ing!