TIP #6: In Praise of Plain English
An important concept in English is register, a scale of the formality of writing.
As you can see below, the scale has ‘FORMAL’ at the top and ‘SLANG’ at the bottom. Let’s use money, a classic, mid-register word, as an example and populate the register with synonyms for it:
What do you notice about the formal, upper register words?
They’re longer and harder to spell. They’re less well understood. They’re more elevated, exclusive, solemn and aloof; they risk alienating your reader. Acting more as a barrier than a bridge, upper register words put distance between you and your reader. And that’s bad news if you’re trying to persuade them to do something they wouldn’t otherwise do.
Conversational, mid-register language brings our reader close and helps establish an intimacy with them. It helps them warm to us on a human level.
Besides losing emotion and pushing the reader away, something else happens to language as we move up the register.
I’ll give you a clue: take some money out of your pocket, wallet or purse and play around with it. Touch it, smell it, look at it. If it’s a coin, tap it on the table; if it’s a note, wave it in the air. Could you do that with any of the upper register words? No. As we move up the register, language not only becomes longer, harder to spell and more sophisticated; it also becomes more
abstract.
So what?
Abstract language is harder for the human brain to process. Adopting a formal, high register style makes your reader work hard to get your meaning. The harder they work, the likelier they are to stop reading.
Mid-register = plain English
Generally, the best place to be is in the middle of the register. Where upper register lingo is derived from Latin and Greek, mid-register is the home of good old Anglo-Saxon, aka plain English, or PE. Here the words are shorter, pithier and universally understood. Everyone knows what
cash is and what it does; not everyone knows what an
emolument is — and why should they?
Here are some PE alternatives to the most common examples of posh-speak:
This is not about dumbing-down
Sometimes when people look at this list, they lament the loss of linguistic sophistication and accuse me of wanting to dumb-down their writing.
Nothing could be farther from the truth.
The content of your writing must still be top-notch, i.e. engaging, relevant and intellectually rigorous. But that doesn’t mean you have to convey it in formal, upper-register language. The real challenge in writing is to express complex ideas so simply (but not simplistically) that your reader ‘gets’ them in one go. That will impress your reader much more than long, fancy words.
In the next issue of Writing Tips for Top Consultants, we’ll look at how to cure nounitis, a virulent condition afflicting much business writing. Till then!
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Notes on the readability stats: my ASL (Average Sentence Length) is OK at 13.4 words; my passive sentences come in at 6%, which is acceptable; my overall readability is 67.9%, well into plain English, which kicks in at 60% FRE.
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