This piece by Andy Nairn summarises an academic article from 2017 titled “Fuck nuance”. It’s well worth a read.

People try to be too clever with their marketing. The average customer doesn’t have time for us to dance around the topic. You’ll get further, quicker, if you make things easy to understand and simple to do. That’s it.

I see this a lot with consultants in particular. What does that involve? What value do you add? Consultants make things more complicated so that you are happier paying more.

As my favourite book puts it, simplification is “not dumbing down, it’s opening up”.

Being understood is the aim of communication. We have a better chance of people doing what we ask if they understand what we’re saying. If you can’t explain something simply then the chances are you don’t understand it yourself. How can you expect your customer to?

Plain English

One way to make things simple is to use plain English. This involves making online content clear and understandable. This means “users with different literacy levels and access challenges” aren’t ignored.

Readability Guidelines features a section on plain English. The advice is:

• Choose easy and short words, not formal, long ones.
• Jargon and buzzwords are unlikely to be clear language.
• Write conversationally, in first person, using the active voice.
• Test your content with users.

Hemingway is one app that can help you write using the active voice. The app prompts you to make sentences shorter and highlights ones that are difficult to read.

The app has given the content to this point a Grade 5. There are no examples of the passive voice or 'hard to read' sentences.

Other links about language

This week I delivered a session about copywriting to my apprentices. I showed them Hemingway and introduced them to the concept of plain English. I also shared a few other resources that I’ll link to below:

• This great blog from the Co-op’s digital team explaining the language they use for their funeral services.
• Mailchimp’s content style guide. It explains how to write about people, how to structure educational content, and plenty of other examples. It’s meant for internal staff, but they’ve made it public.
• Buffer’s explanation of how you create a company-wide style guide, with examples from their own.
• The Plain English Campaign has a list of guides and documents to help you use it in your day-to-day lives.