This is a transcript of one of the videos in 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.
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Write with concrete ideas rather than abstract ideas
Another thing to do when we’re writing is to try and write in concrete terms rather than abstract.
So instead of writing, ‘be kind’, how about I write ‘let someone else go first’? Let me explain what it is to be kind by giving an example of it.
Here’s an example from the COVID era. Instead of talking about ‘social distancing’, why don’t we explain what that means? What action do we need to take? Hey, ‘stay at home, get your groceries once per week’, something like that.
I understand that some airlines are no longer using the term ‘brace’, they’re just saying ‘heads down, hands on your head’, being very concrete about the action that people need to take in an emergency situation. That’s helpful, of course, because the word brace has different meanings in different contexts. It means one thing in the aviation industry. That means another thing in the construction industry. It means something else in the medical industry.
So let’s be concrete as much as we can.
Here’s another example. We could write. ‘After recognising some problems with the solar mirrors, we took subsequent corrective measures.’ Hmm. It doesn’t tell me too much. We’ve got some abstract ideas there about problems and corrective measures. It might be better to write ‘after finding that high winds and not hail had cracked the 10 solar mirrors would began stowing the mirrors in a vertical position during thunderstorms’. Be concrete rather than abstract when you can.
Paragraphs are just a set of related sentences
Now when it comes to putting a paragraph together, there’s nothing particularly complex or tricky about paragraphs. Paragraphs are just a bunch of sentences, all related to a single idea.
Now, the first sentence in your paragraph should have that big single controlling idea. Sometimes that’s called the topic sentence. It’s just a matter of writing point first. I’m going to give you the big idea right at the very beginning of the paragraph and my other sentences will expand or explain that a little in further detail.
And of course, whenever you’ve got a new idea, that’s the time to start a new paragraph.
Number of words in a sentence
Now, in terms of sentence length, we reckon around about 15 to 20 words per sentence, but that’s an average. OK, there’s nothing wrong with a three word sentence. There’s nothing wrong with the 35 word sentence. Just don’t do them all the time. It’s good to have a lot of variety. But we think on average around about 15 to 20 words per sentence and around about four to six sentences per paragraph seems to work pretty well.
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