The plain English campaign provides a writting guide called “How to write in plain English”. I found this guide useful as it helps to write better informative text. So this might be valuable for other bloggers to. The advices provided by the guide are:
- Keep your sentences short: A clear sentence should have an average sentence length of 15 20 words
- Prefer active verbs
- Use “You” and “We”
- Don’t be afraid to give instructions: Use imperative instead of you should …
- Avoid nominalisations: Use verbs (complete for instance) instead of their nominalisation (completion)
- Use positive language
- Use lists where appropriate
The guides provides at the end a list of words to avoid and suggests alternatives. Some words to avoid (alternatives in round brackets):
- additional (extra)
- particulars (details)
- regarding (about)
- terminate (end)
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