Some guidelines to write in plain English
Published by jose.lise August 14th, 2006 in Productivity, WebTags: advices, bloggers, plain english campaign, writting.
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)
You might also be interested in these
- links for 2006-12-23
- About
- links for 2008-03-07
- Everyday I write the book by Elvis Costello
- links for 2007-07-27
















No Responses to “Some guidelines to write in plain English”
Please Wait
Leave a Reply