Plain English myth #4 – “It should be like a conversation”

While it is true that using a conversational tone can be part of writing (and editing) in plain English, we don’t only need to use words when communicating with our readers, and sometimes words are not the easiest way for an audience to make sense of the information we want to share with them.

Assist the reader to see what we are saying

Visual depictions of ideas and data can be helpful for all readers, and particularly for folks with low literacy or who don’t speak English fluently. Visual communication can be through graphs, graphics, symbols, tables and illustrations. To keep text accessible, we should also include some explanatory wording to describe the visual element, and use alt text for images in electronic documents.

An example

If you wanted to share the proportion of your staff that work in each area of your organisation, you could say “Thirty percent of our team work in sales, twenty percent work in administration, ten percent are in management and forty percent work in service delivery.”

That might be how you would say it out aloud, but on paper or on the screen, it can be a lot easier to absorb and navigate that type of information in a pie chart.

An example of a pie chart that I had fun making