A client's new marketing partner read one of our documents last week and gave one piece of feedback: it reads too heavy.
He was right. And the fix taught me something I had wrong about plain language in business writing. I had always assumed that making a document simpler meant making it smaller — fewer ideas, softer claims, less expertise on the page. That is not it at all.
What "too heavy" actually meant
The document is a pre-call brief. Before one of my client's architects gets on a call with a restaurant owner, he opens a page that tells him what the venue is, how big the outdoor space is, what the local rules allow, and what that space could be worth.
It is a good document. It is also read by someone whose first language is not English.
That second fact is the whole story. The brief was written the way people write briefs — long sentences, clauses stacked on clauses, the point arriving somewhere near the end. A native speaker skims that and gets it. Someone reading in their second language has to unpick it, and unpicking it before a sales call is a cost nobody should be paying.
The rule that fixed it
We set four rules, and the fourth is the one that matters:
- Short sentences. One idea per sentence.
- No inverted or tangled sentence structures. Say who did what, in that order.
- No complicated words where a plain one does the same job.
- Except the trade terminology — that stays.
That last line is the whole trick. The writing style simplifies. The vocabulary's professionalism does not.
An architect needs to read "ground snow load" and "design wind speed." Those are not fancy words; they are the correct words, and swapping them for something friendlier would make the document less useful, not more. Simplify the sentences around the technical terms, and keep the terms exactly where they are.
Is there a difference between simple writing and simple thinking?
Yes, and confusing them is how good documents get ruined.
Simple writing is about the reader's effort — how much work they do to get your meaning. Simple thinking is about the content — how much you actually know. You want the first as low as possible and the second as high as possible.
When someone says your document is hard to read, the instinct is to cut the substance. Don't. Cut the sentence length, cut the inversions, cut the words you chose because they sounded senior. Then check whether anything of value went with them. If it did, put it back.
The word that turned out to mean something else
The best catch of the whole job was a heading, not a sentence.
The brief had a section called "Pitch points" — sales language for "here is what to say." Except to an architect, pitch means the slope of a roof. He would open a document about a rooftop structure and read a heading that appeared to be about roof geometry.
We renamed it "What to say on the call."
Two more went the same way. A heading using the bare word "code" could read as software code, so it became "What the building code requires." An idiom that made sense to us — "Look for yourself" — became "Links you can open."
Here is the part worth keeping: the trade-terminology exception did not protect "pitch." The exception exists for terms the reader needs. Sales jargon is not a term the reader needs. It was our vocabulary, not his.
How to run this check on your own documents
Take one document a client or a colleague actually reads and go through it three times.
Pass one — sentence length
Read it aloud. Anywhere you run out of breath, there is a sentence to split.
Pass two — whose dictionary is this?
Circle every specialist word. For each one, ask: is this a word my reader needs, or a word my industry uses? Keep the first. Replace the second.
Pass three — the ambiguity test
Check whether any word means one thing in your world and something else in theirs. Those are the dangerous ones, because nobody asks — they just read it wrong and move on.
The point of plain language in business writing is not to sound less expert. It is to get the expertise across the gap between you and the person reading. Every extra clause is a place where some of it leaks out.
If a document is hard to read, shorten the sentences before you shrink the ideas.