b. What makes plain English writing different? (4 Marks)
Plain english writing is different than other writing such as academic writing (like I am doing to respond to theory based questions given to me in not just this class but this program) as it is putting the everyday reader with basic level english reading knowledge (with respect to the current literacy rate) first in how the content is actually being written. This all comes down to several different aspects of the writing such as the wording and the way it’s structured. When it comes to the wording of the written content, it is different as it takes on a different goal from other types of writing to actually not use as many big or “difficult to understand” words that readers would not easily grasp on the first quick read through. Instead, it makes the writing easy, quick and contains just enough words to get the information across. This brings me to how it is structured which as I just said, is different because it aims to be as brief and concise as possible to include just as much writing/words as needed to ensure that the reader does not have to spend copious amounts of time reading through the content. This varies from a type of writing such as more formal or academic writing which aims to use more specialized wording that covers as many details as possible to explain each facet of what is being spoken about. Plain language English is also different as it takes into account “who your audiences are and what they need” in terms of what they could be in search of within your writing and how much time they would even be willing to spend reading your content. Plain language also prioritises appealing to the most people possible within this target audience which does mean (unlike more academic writing) considering the current literacy rates within Canada (or wherever the writing is for) as like we briefly discussed in our class discussion has progressively gotten lower over the years, meaning plain english writing is more crucial than ever in how it uses simpler yet relevant language to accurately write content with respect to the target audience and their time.
A good example of just how differently plain could have operated to help readers understand writing is when in class we were shown an image that had a phrase (I do not remember word for word) but it contained the word “waterlemon”. Due to our human nature and the fact that we often times will just quickly skim through passages of writing like this even when they are small and within a photo, many of the students in our class were under the initial impression that this word as watermelon due the the simile spelling and the way in which an english speaker would generally know to expect a space in between “water” and “lemon” which was not present there and brought many of us to immediately read the writing as “watermelon. This is very significant for why plain english writing is different as usually plain english writing will sort of put the reader first by trying to eliminate the potential of readers not understanding what happened in the first read because many people won’t take the time to read the writing over and therefore might not have even noticed in this instance that the word was in fact not “watermelon” had our professor not told us it was likely not saying what we initially believed it was.
RESOURCES:
- Briscose, W8 – A – Plain Language Writing (W26).pdf, Slide 20
- Briscoe, Lecture, February 25, 2026
- Brisoce, Lecture, February 25 2026
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