Short sentences, ordinary words, and the active voice
Aliases: plain English · active voice · everyday words
What it is
At sentence level, plain language is three moves: one job per sentence, words the reader would actually say, and the active voice so someone does something. “The application will be reviewed” hides the actor and the clock. “We will tell you within three working days” puts both back. The rewrite lowers parse cost. It does not turn the content into a nursery rhyme.
Why it happens
Working memory has to hold subject, modifiers and clauses at once. Long sentences, nested embedding, and passives that bury or drop the actor force a rebuild of “who did what to whom” before the proposition even starts. Unfamiliar words need a lexicon lookup; a miss leaves a hole. Under stress — an error page, a clinical consent, a refund rule while running for a train — that memory is smaller, and the three moves pay more.
The active voice is not a style taste. In an interface the passive often means nobody is responsible: the user does not know whom to wait for or what to press. Short is not ever-shorter; shards that lose their antecedents make the reader glue the pieces, and the cost returns. Ordinary words means the audience’s spoken lexicon, not the editor’s.
Studying it
Two versions of the same facts. Measure reading time, whether a paraphrase still contains actor and condition, regressions while reading aloud. Cloze (delete-and-fill) tests whether the “ordinary” words actually sit in the reader’s lexicon.
Independent variables: mean sentence length, passive rate, whether rare words were swapped. Dependent variables: completeness of paraphrase (who, does what, under what condition), action errors, regression count.
Do not use a grade-level score as the only dependent measure — splitting sentences improves the formula without improving understanding. Items must ask conditions and actors, not whether the gist felt close.
Where it stops holding
Internal legal or clinical full text may need its terms for accuracy; the public-facing layer still has to say consequences in the reader’s words. Microcopy that is already short will fragment if split again, and reference will drop. API readers are specialists; swapping every term for everyday words loses precision. Verse and slogans are not instructions; the three moves are not their job.
Applying it
- Flows, errors, consents, deadlines: one job per sentence. Split where you can, then check the antecedents still resolve.
- Use words the audience would say. Restore the actor on passives — “notice will be issued” becomes who tells whom, and when.
- How to check: a target reader who is not on the project reads the critical copy and paraphrases who does what, and by when. Missing actor or condition means rewrite the sentence, not add a paragraph of gloss.