Plain English - How

Towards more picturesque speech™ →Go uptown {{{2}}} SEC guidance on plain EnglishIndex: Click ᐅ to expand: Plain English Drafting Metaphor Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

General Principles

Organise your writing.

Spend time structuring of your writing.

• Put the important points first.
• Use nested paragraphs
  • They help organise your thoughts.
  • The clearer your structure, the easier it is to follow.

Edit your writing.

It is hard to write clearly. You have to work at it. Editing is harder work than writing. It takes three times as long. So write two thirds fewer sentences. But make them good ones. Take pride in your work. Be elegant.

Be self-critical.

We are lawyers: elegant writing doesn't come naturally to us. We had it trained out of us. The cultural weight of our education, training and professional development conditioned us to write in a certain way. To stop writing that way, we must be very self-critical.

Keep it positive

• Prefer positives to negatives.
• Avoid double negatives.
• Recoil in horror from triple negatives.

Sexist language

You are writing for men and women. If you write “he” all the time you risk irritating half your audience. Writing “she” risks irritating the other half. Writing “s/he”, “he or she” or “it” risks irritating all of them. There are things you can do:

• Write in the plural: Instead of “I am yet to meet a client who tells his lawyer to avoid write incomprehensibly” say “Clients don’t tell their lawyers to write incomprehensibly”.
• Write in the first and second person: I’ve never had a client ask me to write incomprehensibly”.

Enumerations

• Break into subparagraphs:
• Branch right, not left:

Style

• Use strong verbs, instead of modified weaker ones. Prefer "bellowed" to "Shouted loudly".
• Avoid wimpy writing: Avoid "almost", "seems to".