Challenge 2: Plain Language
What is Plain Language?
Every day, students are asked to read assignment instructions, announcements, rubrics, policies, and feedback. If these materials are difficult to understand, students spend valuable mental energy figuring out what you mean instead of focusing on what they’re learning.
Plain language is a communication approach that helps readers find information, understand it, and use it the first time they read it (International Plain Language Federation). It focuses on the needs of the reader by using clear wording, logical organization, and thoughtful design. With plain language the needs and experience of the reader are the focus.
When designing with plain language in mind, ask yourself:
- Who is your audience?
- Why are you writing to them?
- What outcome do you want?
Plain language isn’t about simplifying ideas. It doesn’t remove academic rigour or condense complex ideas. Instead, it removes unnecessary barriers so learners can spend their effort engaging with course content rather than decoding instructions.
Why Does This Matter?
It’s easy to assume that post-secondary students can understand any course material we give them. In reality, 49% of Canadian adults struggle to understand complex text, including more than 1 in 4 adults who have post-secondary education (Worfolk, 2022).
Plain language helps remove that barrier. By using clear words, organizing information logically, and making key details easy to find, you make it more likely that students will understand your message the first time they read it.
Clear writing benefits all students. Students are often juggling multiple courses, work, family, and countless documents to read each week. When your materials are easier to read, they require less mental effort to process, helping reduce cognitive fatigue.
The benefits extend to educators, too. When students can easily understand your instructions, they’re more likely to complete tasks correctly, ask fewer clarification questions, and spend less time trying to interpret what you meant. A few small changes to your writing can save time, reduce confusion, and create a more equitable learning experience for everyone.
Examples
In the table below are examples of commonly wordy phrases and their plain language alternatives.
| Wordy Phrase | Plain Language Alternative |
|---|---|
| pertaining to | about |
| conduct an analysis | analyze |
| provide assistance | help |
| make a recommendation | recommend |
| with regard to | about |
| due to the fact that | because |
| the means by which | the way |
| subsequent to | after |
Try It Yourself!
The Cloze Test is a tool used to measure how easily readers understand a piece of writing. It removes words from a passage and asks readers to fill in the blanks. The more words a reader can fill in correctly means that the text is easier to comprehend. Educators can use this test to identify areas where learning materials may need clearer language, simpler sentence structures, or more context.
Below are two example paragraphs. Press the Turn button to see the missing words and the Next button to see the next paragraph.
As you read, ask yourself:
- Which paragraph is easier to follow?
- Which one do you think would score 60% or higher on a Cloze Test?
- What makes the difference?
Try this with your own materials. Take a paragraph from your syllabus or assignment instructions, remove every 5th or 6th word, and have a colleague try to fill it out. Use the comment section to share your thoughts!
Further Resources
Up Next
Our next challenge will be on making digital images accessible to all through image descriptions.
This challenge is adapted from the “BCcampus Accessibility Bites Series: Plain Language” by Kaitlyn Vecchio, used under CCBY 4.0
keith Tyler
The Cloze test was new to me and I think it will be a game changer working with subject matter experts to condense their output into learner ready materials
Caterina Valentino
Plain language—communicating clearly, concisely, and without unnecessary jargon—has become a cornerstone of effective modern communication across healthcare, law, and public policy. Its primary strength lies in democratizing information. By stripping away dense terminology and convoluted syntax, plain language drastically improves reader comprehension, enhances user compliance, and fosters institutional trust. In clinical or civic settings, clear communication directly correlates with improved health literacy, safer outcomes, and higher public engagement.
However, a critical appraisal reveals noticeable trade-offs, primarily centered on the risk of oversimplification. In specialized domains, dense terminology carries highly specific legal, scientific, or technical nuances established over decades. Translating these precise terms into plain language can obscure critical edge cases, introducing ambiguity, misinterpretation, or regulatory liability. Additionally, an uncritical, blanket application of plain language can patronize expert audiences or strip complex analytical discourse of the granularity required for rigorous problem-solving.
Ultimately, plain language is best understood not as a blunt stylistic rule, but as a contextual strategy. Its success hinges on rigorous audience analysis—balancing the demand for universal accessibility against the necessity of technical precision. When implemented judiciously, plain language serves as a powerful bridge between expertise and equity, ensuring information remains accurate enough to be reliable and accessible enough to be useful.
Tracy
Thank you for sharing these thoughts Caterina, they capture some really important points. As someone who works in the veterinary medical field, I appreciate these more finer distinctions that you are outlining here.
Where I have found plain language particularly helpful is in the realm of assignments and testing questions, and yet maintaining the specificity required in medicine. Your critical review helps illustrate how this conversation can be a ‘Yes and…’ instead of an ‘either or’.
Heather Mitchell
I appreciate having tools that help me review the text I write because I don’t always feel confident in judging how clear and understandable it is.
Early in my career, not so many years after graduating university, plain language had its moment in post-secondary education. I learned a great deal during that time and struggled to let go of the idea that good writing needed to sound sophisticated. I decided then that being understood by my audience was more important than sounding ‘smart’, and that including people was more important than excluding them. That principle has continued to guide how I write.
I use a mental checklist when I edit. I look at sentence length, word choice, unnecessary wording, the order of information, and punctuation. Even with that process, I know there are times when I fall short.
I also find there is often a tension between making something as simple as possible and preserving the integrity and accuracy of the subject matter. Clear writing is not always about using fewer words; sometimes it is about choosing the right words and presenting ideas in a logical order.
I find AI to be a valuable editing tool because it gives me alternatives that I might not have considered. It helps me compare my writing with other ways of expressing the same idea, challenging the habits and patterns I naturally fall into as a writer. I don’t use it to replace my thinking, but to help me evaluate whether what I have written is as clear and understandable as it can be.
Tracy
I appreciate your note about using AI to provide alternatives to our writing, helping to make materials clearer and more concise, and it mirrors my experience. The quality of the work that I put in greatly affects the end recommendations that AI will make.
Doug Strable
Thank you for focusing our second challenge on the importance of plain language in writing. I regularly write for readers whose first language is not English, and I agree that the most important thing is to get the message across clearly and quickly. I have found that I need to adapt my writing and get to the point more directly.
The Cloze Test is new to me, and it is definitely an interesting way to test if readers can easily follow the text. In practice, I found the process rather time-consuming. I was also hesitant to paste content into a website when I could not easily find information about its security and privacy practices. The site says to send an email for more information.
This led me to experiment with a few GenAI prompts using the same writing sample and a higher-reasoning or “thinking” setting. The AI was able to identify possible jargon, abstract wording, and unnecessarily complex sentences, and explain why they might be difficult for readers. I could then decide whether or not to use the suggestions.
I found GenAI very helpful for picking out complex wording quickly, and will continue to test!
Suman Kumar
Going through the Readability Index, and as someone who has been teaching Adult Upgrading students for a while, and also having trained students for different English Language level tests for a long time, I find that the Index needs to be expanded further. Please correct me if I have missed getting more information for myself.
Whether it is native English speakers or International students, spoken and written/reading standards are totally different. Plain language, as I had been introduced to it by Worfolk, is more about reading comprehension provided by the teacher/writer. Where do we compare non-native speakers here, when international students need a very high level of IELTS (or other) scores to become (here, Canadian) students in a western English speaking country? How can we compare CLB levels to the Readability Index when it comes to adult students in Adult Basic Education.
I would love your feedback for when we stop using plain language, say grade 9, 10 or even 11? Because, the prerequisites for many career-based courses require grade 11 or 12 English. I am open to all suggestions/critical feedback, with thanks in advance.