Say it plainer
Every rewrite toward plain language is a rewrite toward trust. On why the fancy version only ever impresses one person.
There’s a version of every sentence that exists to impress the person who wrote it. You can usually spot it by the syllable count.
Most of the copy that crosses our desks arrives in that version. Smart people describing real businesses, but somewhere between knowing the thing and writing the thing, a translator gets involved. The translator has a thesaurus and a nervous streak. “We fix roofs” goes in; something about comprehensive exterior asset protection comes out.
Consider a sentence we’ve read a hundred times in a hundred fonts:
We provide comprehensive, integrated solutions that drive meaningful outcomes for forward-thinking organizations.
Twelve words, zero information. It could be a bank, a staffing firm, or a company that installs commercial aquariums. Nobody has ever read that sentence and felt anything. And here’s the uncomfortable part: it wasn’t written for the reader at all. It was written for the boardroom that approved it, for the founder who wanted to sound bigger, for the copywriter who wanted to sound smart. The fancy version always has an audience of one, and it’s never the customer.
The scarier version
The plain version is scarier to write. Say “we do bookkeeping for construction companies” and you’ve made a claim someone can check. You’ve admitted what you don’t do, and handed the reader a sentence sharp enough to disagree with. Abstraction is armor, and taking it off feels like a risk.
But watch what plain language does on the other side of the screen. A reader hits a clear sentence and something unclenches. Oh, they think. These people are just going to tell me. No decoding, no squinting, no translating marketing back into English. Every reader runs the same quiet program on your copy anyway: what do these people actually do, and do I believe them. Plain writing arrives pre-translated, and the reader registers that as respect, because it is. You did the work so they wouldn’t have to.
Every rewrite toward plain language is a rewrite toward trust.
That’s the trade nobody mentions. Jargon says we’re hiding something, possibly from ourselves. Clarity says we know exactly what we are, and we’re comfortable enough to put it in words a stranger could repeat. Repeatability matters more than it gets credit for, too: the best sentence on your website is the one a customer can say to another customer at a barbecue without checking their phone.
The twentieth draft
Getting there is real work, which is the other thing nobody mentions. Plain is not the same as easy, and the plainest sentence on the page is usually the twentieth draft, because you have to keep asking what you actually mean and the sentence keeps refusing to hide the fact that you’re not sure yet and eventually you either decide or you reach for the thesaurus again. Deciding is the job. The thesaurus is the escape hatch.
To be clear, none of this is an argument for dumbing anything down. Plain language can hold a complicated idea; it just refuses to hide a missing one. Some of the sharpest writing we know is built from one- and two-syllable words, arranged by someone who knew exactly what they thought.
Our test is old and unglamorous: read the sentence out loud, across a table, to a person you respect. If you’d be embarrassed to say it to their face, it doesn’t belong on your homepage. A nod means you’re close. And when they repeat it back later, in their own words, to someone else entirely, you’re done.
The fancy version will keep whispering that it sounds more professional. It does sound like something. Mostly it sounds like every other company that was too nervous to say it plainer.
