On Plain Language
Written By:
Kelsie Acton
January 14, 2021
One of the many ways I think about access is as a practice. This means access is something I can grow and get better at. Right now, an access practice I’m excited by is plain language.
There’s a few definitions of plain language. But for me, plain language is language that is easily understood by a wide range of readers.
Plain language:
- Uses the most common vocabulary possible so that readers aren’t stopped by unfamiliar words
- Uses active voice, so it is clear who is doing what
- Uses short sentences
- Uses headings, lists, bullet points, and white space to make information clearer
- Uses definitions to introduce readers to complicated vocabulary
Like most access, plain language is ideally tested by users and changed based on feedback.
There’s a few reasons I’m invested in plain language:
- I worry that we imagine the audience for our art, activism and scholarship is only for people who easily understand written English.
- I believe the ideas that can change people and change the world should be accessible to everyone.
- Art, activism and scholarship that isn’t accessible to people who don’t easily understand written English, excludes people. Often this art, activism or scholarship is against excluding people.
- A lot of activism happens through writing. Making plain language writing ordinary means that more people can do activism through writing.
Beyond the access reasons to work in plain language as much as possible, I’ve found that it’s helpful to my own understanding. I have the kind of brain that loves words. I feel them as much as I think them. But this means that sometimes I understand writing on a gut level and I can’t explain what I mean.
Plain language means that I have to define vocabulary. So if I’m writing about settler colonialism, I have to think about what exactly that word means. I have to make it clear that this type of colonialism is about the colonizing nation replacing the original people of a land with people who come from the colonizing nation.
Writing in active voice encourages me to think about who is doing what. In the example above, it means that I make it explicit that settler colonialism is a decision of the colonizing nation. It might mean that I have to think about my relationship to the concept I’m describing and describe what I do in relation to the concept.
Maybe I need to find an example that makes the definition clear. Finding examples means that I learn about specific histories and understand how a complex concept practically works.
Plain language also means that I have to think about what information is most important to the reader so I can use headings, bullets and white space to highlight this information.
All this work will help me the next time I have to explain this concept to someone. But just as importantly plain language helps me be clear about my own values – what I believe in and how I am understanding my own art, activism and scholarship.
This is not without moments of friction for me. For example, the Critical Design Lab’s Statement on Design Commitments to Abolishing White Supremacy is a beautifully written document. The words make me feel as much as think. Part of the first commitment reads:
As we have witnessed, questions of who lives and dies from COVID-19 reflect hierarchies of valued life that were designed by slavery, colonialism, and eugenics, that live on in systems of medical apartheid, and that find manifestation in ableist calculations of productive and valued life. Thus, built environments have agency: they produce effects both with and without intention. In discussions of the destruction of property, we ought to remember that buildings and other designed things are meaning-making devices that both reflect and signal racism.
When I read these words I feel the way that everything in my environment has been created in systems where white, non-disabled lives are more valuable. I feel like I can reach out, touch the world around me and feel the way the world is made for some people and not for others.
I wrote this paragraph in plain language as:
- Buildings are places where violence happens. Buildings, like prisons and nursing homes, can be designed for violence. Statues and buildings can honor violence. Cities and buildings stand on land stolen from Indigenous people
- People don’t always intend for buildings to hurt Black and Indigenous people but they still do
- When people destroy buildings they are attacking this violence
I’m not as moved by this language. There are not as many references to the many, many ways that racist and ableist violence is casually enacted. The buildings and the world don’t feel active. They lack the agency that the original statement conjures. The statement feels flatter, less complex. More facts, less feeling.
When I have these feelings of disappointment about how I can’t capture the beauty of the original statement in the plain language there’s a couple of questions I ask:
- Is this because I need to get better at plain language? Maybe the lack of beauty is about my lack of skill.
- How have I been taught to value complex, academic writing and been taught to devalue plain language? I have over a decade of schooling that has taught me to write in a particular way. I have been rewarded, often with scholarship and grant money, for my ability to write in ways that are not plain language. Maybe my frustration with my plain language translation is about being scared that I’m writing differently than the way I’ve been taught to write.
I also remind myself that there are many ways to be moved. I want to be working in ways that consider people who are reading this statement in their second language; who are neurodivergent, including people deemed cognitively disabled; or who, for whatever reason, find long written statements difficult. Those people are designers too.
Some useful resources on plain language: