Why Plain English Isn’t ‘dumbing down’ via Medium

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Why Plain English Isn’t ‘dumbing down’

Medium: 9.24.2017 by Dominic Warren

I was in a meeting recently and was finally confronted with a phrase I’ve been expecting to hear since I started in content design. “No, I don’t agree, that’s just dumbing down.” Someone had finally used the words “dumbing down” when discussing the content. It’s been a long time coming.

Without an understanding of content and how users read on the web, it would be easy to just chuck all the information you know onto the page. But there’s important reasons we use plain English and write the way we do.

Plain English

Google Dictionary defines plain English as:

“clear and unambiguous language, without the use of technical or difficult terms”

It’s using language simply so it’s as easy to understand as possible.

We do this because we don’t read on the web the same way we read printed media, such as books and newspapers. We scan the page. As mentioned in a previous article, we don’t read fluidly, we saccade. This is when your eyes move from one point of the page to the other in no particular order, jumping quickly all over the place.

Our content also has to fight against outside influences. Our readers have lives, thoughts and emotions that can get in the way of reading huge amounts of technical text online. They might have children fighting for their attention, or they might have been through a recent trauma. They might just have something better and more interesting to do. So making the content easy to understand and simple to follow is the most important thing we can do as writers.

This is why content should be task-focused where possible, especially for services. If we want the user to do something, tell them what to do and how to do it quickly and easily. They don’t have the time to sit down and read through guidance after guidance. If they need to know something, tell them it straight away at the top of the page. READ MORE >>