Plain language, and who requires it

Is plain language actually required anywhere?

Yes, and by name. The Plain Writing Act of 2010 is Public Law 111-274, approved October 13, 2010. It requires federal agencies to use plain writing in covered documents.¹

The Act supplies its own definition rather than leaving the term open. Plain writing is writing that is clear, concise, well-organized, and follows other best practices appropriate to the subject or field and intended audience.¹ The last clause matters, because it makes the standard relative to the reader rather than absolute.

Securities filings are governed separately and more specifically. The Securities and Exchange Commission's rule on the presentation of information in prospectuses sets out what a filer has to do, and it is a rule rather than guidance.² Between the two, a large amount of the writing an ordinary person receives from a government or a company is covered by something.

Which documents does the Plain Writing Act cover?

Documents the public has to use, rather than everything an agency writes. Three categories are named. The Act reaches material necessary for obtaining a federal benefit or service or for filing taxes. It also reaches material that provides information about a federal benefit or service, and material explaining how to comply with a federal requirement.¹

The forms named include letters, publications, notices, forms, and instructions, in paper or electronic form.¹ Regulations are excluded, which is a distinction worth holding on to: the rule that tells you what to do is outside the Act, while the notice explaining it is inside.

The Act also set two deadlines. Agencies had nine months from enactment to designate senior officials, train staff, and set up oversight. They had one year to use plain writing in every covered document they issue or substantially revise.¹

What does the SEC rule actually require?

Specific writing practices rather than a general instruction to be clear. The rule asks for information presented in clear, concise sections, paragraphs, and sentences, and for descriptive headings and subheadings. It also tells filers to avoid legal and highly technical business terminology.²

For the cover page, the summary, and the risk factors it goes further, naming six principles. The first three are short sentences, definite and concrete everyday words, and the active voice. The other three are tabular presentation or bullet lists for complex material wherever possible, no legal jargon or highly technical business terms, and no multiple negatives.²

That list is unusual among writing rules because every item on it is checkable. An editor can report the sentences over a given length, the passive constructions, and the multiple negatives, and the report is a count rather than an opinion.

Does plain language mean dumbing the document down?

No, and the statutory definition is the argument against it. Plain writing is defined as clear, concise, well-organized, and following best practices appropriate to the subject or field and intended audience.¹ A document written for specialists is plain when specialists can read it easily.

The SEC rule makes the same distinction in practice. It tells filers to avoid legal and highly technical business terminology.² It does not tell them to remove the substance those terms carry. The terms come out, and the meaning stays, expressed differently.

What plain language removes is the part that was never doing any work. The throat-clearing, the doubled negatives, and the sentence with four subordinate clauses that could have been three sentences all go, and none of that was content.

The objection is worth taking seriously anyway, because a careless edit can lose precision. That is why a change altering what a document asserts should arrive as a query rather than as a correction.

My document is not a federal notice or a prospectus. Does any of this apply?

Not as law, and the practices travel anyway. The six principles the SEC names are the same ones that make any dense document readable, and they were written for material that is legally required to be exact rather than for casual prose.

Editors Canada arrives at the same place from the editorial side. Its definition of stylistic editing includes removing jargon and clichés and establishing an appropriate language level for the audience.³

That is the useful point for a business or technical writer. Precision and plainness are treated as compatible by the body with the strongest interest in precision, which undercuts the usual objection that clear writing loses accuracy.

Where an internal or client-facing document is being edited, those principles are a defensible specification to hand an editor. They are published, they are specific, and they are not one person's taste.

Who decides whether my document is clear enough?

Your reader decides, and no rule replaces that. What a rule can do is name checkable properties that tend to go with clarity, which is what both of these do.

That is also why a readability score is a weak instrument on its own. It measures sentence and word length, which are two of the six things the Commission names and none of the others.

An editor can measure against the named properties. Sentence length, passive constructions, multiple negatives, undefined terms, and headings that describe their sections are all countable, and a report of those counts is evidence rather than judgment.

Whether the document then works is a question about the reader, and testing it with readers is a different activity from editing it. An editor who claims a document is now clear to your audience is claiming something they have not measured.

Can an editor make a document compliant?

An editor can edit toward a specification and cannot certify the result. Compliance with the Plain Writing Act is an agency's own responsibility under the Act.¹ Compliance with the Commission's rule sits with the filer.² Neither statute contemplates an outside editor as the responsible party, and no editor should offer to be one.

What an editor supplies is the work and the record. That means the passages changed, the counts before and after, and a list of anything the specification reaches that was left alone because changing it would have altered meaning.

We are editors and not attorneys or compliance officers. We do not sign off a filing. Where a change would alter what a document asserts, we query it rather than make it, and the decision stays with the client.

What should I send if my document is governed by a rule?

The rule itself, or the agency's own guidance on it, along with the document. An editor working from a summary of a requirement is working from somebody else's reading of it.

Where an internal standard also applies, such as a house style or a template, send that too and say which one wins if they conflict. Documents governed by two specifications are common, and the conflicts are usually small and always worth settling in advance.

Sending the deadline is part of this as well, because a filing date is fixed in a way an internal deadline is not. A schedule built backward from it survives contact with a review cycle; one built forward from today usually does not.

Every document a client sends us is treated in confidence, including material that is not yet filed or published.