This is a transcript of one of the videos in a unit of the plain language training course Writing well at work. There are references to slides and visual material that are only available by viewing the video.
Access the full course at Plain language courses – Think-write
Purpose in writing
It seems to me that we could be writing for a mix of three purposes. We could be writing to entertain. I guess that might be magazine articles or novels or something like that. Blogs maybe?
We could be writing to share knowledge. I guess that in its purest form might be something like a textbook.
Or maybe we’re writing to persuade. Yeah, well, that would be marketing material.
Now my guess is that most of your writing at work sits along that bottom axis somewhere, somewhere between persuading and sharing knowledge, and you might be up towards one corner or the other corner, depending on what you’re writing.
But wouldn’t it be great to lift your writing up towards that top corner? Ohh man, that report you wrote? What a page turner that was. That memo – I just had to read that before I left for the day.
But I wanna change that top word from entertain to engage. So that when we write anything, our reader is engaged in it, they realise that it is important. They want to get their head around it because they know there is some content there that they need to act on.
Being reader focused
To write in an engaging way means we need to be reader focused. And this is pretty much going to be the theme for everything I talk about.
We do need to be reader focused, so that means we will need to answer our readers questions. We need to provide content that is relevant to them.
We need to write in a way that touches people’s hearts and minds. I’m not talking about writing gushy stuff, but I am talking about writing in a way that links in with the things that are important to people. Perhaps that they’re even passionate about
And it also needs to be accessible. By accessible I mean it is easy to find and understand and use the information. So those three ideas are important.
The ISO plain language standard
In fact, these four ideas being relevant, findable, understandable and usable, formed the foundation of the international standard on plain language. It was published in 2023 and it is structured around these four big ideas.
Firstly, making sure that readers get what they want. We’ve got relevant content then to make sure they can easily find what they need, they can easily understand it once they find it, and once they understand it, they can use it to do something.
I’m not sure if you’ve ever come across this term, UX writing or user experience writing. When I first saw it, I was highly cynical. I thought that this is just a a new way of describing plain language. Perhaps there’s a whole lot of money around for user experience, not so much for plain language, but as I thought about it a little bit, I thought, you know, there really is some value in thinking that way. What is the user experiencing as they’re encountering my information product? So that is a helpful perspective.
Writing well requires hard work
Now to write in this way is hard work. Mr. Johnson makes the comment ‘what is written without effort is in general read without pleasure’. Have you ever read anything without pleasure? My guess is that you have. I have too.
When you are reading that stuff, it is likely that it has been written without effort. Now there could have been a whole lot of effort in terms of gathering the content, do the research, whatever it is. But when it comes to putting it in a form that makes it easy for me, the reader, to find the information I need, understand it, and then be able to use it, perhaps there hasn’t been a whole lot of effort applied at that point.
I’d be saying that there is no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting. And if you’ve been writing for a while, you will know that that is true. It is not often that we get it perfectly right on our first draft.
So writing will take some effort. There is work involved and I think the nature of the work is twofold.
Clarity and contact
Firstly, we need to make sure that we establish clarity. So that what we write is not ambiguous at any way. The reader picks up our meaning without any modification.
And secondly, we need to make really good contact with our reader so that they understand that this message is important to them and they will need to know how to act on that content that we’re providing with them.
So clarity and contact – that’s the nature of the work. So writing will always require significant effort, significant mental effort.
I hope you’re not doing this course because you thought I’d just do a course on writing and now it will be easy from now on. No, it’s always going to take significant effort.
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