Plain, informative style: facts instead of judgments

Plain, informative style is writing without filler: facts instead of judgments, clichés and officialese, so that every word gives the reader something to check.

What plain, informative style is

Open the website of almost any small business and you’ll probably read something like: “Our team of professionals carries out quality repairs at a high level.” Read it? Now say what exactly they do, how fast and for how much. You can’t. The sentence takes up a line and holds no information at all.

This kind of writing is what plain, informative style is aimed against. In English it is an old tradition. William Strunk Jr.’s The Elements of Style (1918), later reworked by E. B. White, gave the famous rule “Omit needless words”. In 1946 George Orwell, in the essay “Politics and the English Language”, argued that vague, ready-made phrases let a writer stop thinking, and gave six rules, among them: cut a word if you can, prefer the short word to the long one, prefer the active voice to the passive. From the 1970s a plain-language movement took these ideas into law and government. In the UK the Plain English Campaign was founded in 1979. In the United States the Plain Writing Act of 2010 requires federal agencies to write documents the public can understand, and the Federal Plain Language Guidelines at plainlanguage.gov are the working manual. The GOV.UK style guide applies the same ideas to one of the biggest websites in the world.

For the web there is hard evidence too. In 1997 Jakob Nielsen and John Morkes tested versions of the same website text. Promotional language (“the best”, “the greatest”) did worse than plain, objective language, and a version that was concise, scannable and objective together scored 124% better on a usability measure than the original. It is one of the oldest results in web writing, and it is the whole argument of this lesson.

Russian has its own school of the same idea. The editor Maxim Ilyakhov, creator of the text-checking service Glavred, set it out in lectures and in the book “Pishi, sokrashchay” (“Write, Cut”), written with Lyudmila Sarycheva. He calls it informatsionny stil, informative style, and the classification of noise below is the textbook’s own, not his: his is longer and worth reading in the original. The idea is the same everywhere: a text exists for the reader, and every word in it should give the reader something. A fact they can use. Or check. Or both.

For us the method matters because it turns editing from a matter of taste into a matter of checking. Instead of “I don’t like it” you ask: what does this word tell the reader? If nothing, it goes.

Six kinds of noise

Let’s call noise the words that have taken the place of information. The classification below is our own, for teaching. Six groups cover almost everything.

1. A judgment with no fact. “The best”, “quality”, “unique”, “professional”, “reliable”, “personalized approach”. The problem isn’t the word but that nothing stands behind it: the reader can’t check “the best” or “quality”. Trust in such a phrase drops with every use, because everybody writes this way.
2. An amplifier or filler. “Very”, “really”, “absolutely”, “of course”, “as you know”, “actually”. They pretend to emphasize and in fact dilute: if you need the word “really” to be believed, then without it you weren’t.
3. Officialese. “Utilize”, “in accordance with”, “pursuant to”, “prior to”, “in order to”, “provide services in the field of…”. Papers were once written like this in offices, and the habit moved into advertising. It lengthens the sentence and hides the verb. (Russian calls it kantselyarit, “office-ese”, and has the same disease.)
4. An empty phrase. “At this point in time”, “currently”, “in the field of”, “so-called”, “due to the fact that”. Take it out and the meaning doesn’t change.
5. A cliché. “Team of professionals”, “wealth of experience”, “wide range of services”, “your trusted partner”, “we are delighted to welcome you”. These are the same judgments, set into ready-made phrases. The reader skims past them without noticing.
6. A chain of nouns. “The performance of an inspection of quality.” Nouns piled up and no verb. Bring it back: “we inspect”.

Try it yourself. In the diagram below there is a “before” paragraph with every one of these kinds, and under it a list suggests what question to ask. Switch to “after” to see the same message written with facts, and paste your own text into the window: it stays in your browser and goes nowhere.

A fact instead of a judgment

The main move in editing is to find a judgment and ask what stands behind it. Usually it is one of six kinds of fact:

• a number: “forty-two lots surveyed last year” instead of “great experience” (only if it’s true and you can prove it);
• a deadline: “report within 14 days” instead of “fast”;
• a document or source: “license no. 00-00-00, issued by the state board” instead of “licensed professional”;
• an example or a case: “settled a dispute over a fence between two gardens” instead of “we solve difficult problems”;
• a step of the process: “first we visit the site and measure, then we prepare the plan” instead of “a comprehensive approach”;
• a name: who, where, what.

A simple test: ask “how would I check this?” If there is no answer, delete the word. If there is an answer, write it in place of the word.

An example with the default persona, the invented Kate Alder. Before: “I provide a wide range of high-quality services in the field of land surveying.” After: “I mark property lines by measurement and prepare a boundary plan you can file with the county recorder. I visit your property within three business days of your call.” The second version is a few words longer, but it holds three facts. Note that the numbers here are invented along with the persona. Yours will be real. If you don’t have them, don’t make them up. An invented figure is a promise, and promises have to be kept. Advertising law knows about them too: in the United States the FTC expects an advertiser to have proof for a claim before making it, and in the UK the ASA says the same. That comes back in the lesson on expert texts.

And if there really are few facts? Then describe the process: what the person gets at each step. These are facts too, often the most useful, because it is frightening to buy what you don’t understand.

A verb instead of a noun

Officialese usually hides the verb. You would never say aloud “a site visit by a specialist is performed for the purpose of taking measurements”, but you might write it without a second thought. Say it as a person: “We’ll come and measure everything.” The verb brought back the action and the person who does it.

Practical rules that help when there’s no time to think:

• Look for words ending in “-tion” and “-ment”. Beside them you’ll often find helper verbs like “perform”, “conduct”, “carry out”, “provide”. Cross out both and put in the one verb the noun grew from. “The making of a payment” becomes “pay”.
• Name who acts. “Your request will be reviewed”: by whom? Say: “We’ll call you.”
• Watch the passive voice. The passive hides the doer. Use it when the doer really doesn’t matter, and otherwise turn it round.
• Read it aloud. What would you say to a person face to face? Write that, tidied up a little.

Where the method lets you down

Any good technique can be spoiled by zeal. Four cases to remember.

Not every text needs information. Plain, informative style is for texts where the reader is looking for information. In a story about a person, in a greeting, in a letter that should touch someone, the main thing isn’t information but feeling. There the method is applied with care and selectively. A separate part of the course is about stories.

Overdoing it gives a telegram. If you cut everything but facts, the text goes dry and even rude: “Repairs. $12. Call.” The reader will decide you don’t want to talk to them. Tone of voice is a job of its own, and we do it in the fifth lesson.

A tool’s score is not the goal. Tools such as Hemingway Editor, Grammarly or the Russian Glavred work like a magnifying glass: they highlight words worth a look. They don’t understand meaning. A text that scores ten out of ten can be empty, and a text with an “ugly” word can be honest and exact. “Best” with a reference to this year’s award is no longer a judgment but a fact: “winner of the Riverbend Small Business Award, 2025”. Readability scores such as the Flesch reading ease measure sentence and word length, not truth.

Legal texts aren’t simplified at the cost of accuracy. A privacy notice or a contract contains formulas with a precise legal meaning. You can explain them in human language, but you can’t replace the formula with a “simple word”. How to combine the two, we work out in the sixth lesson.

Practice

At the bottom of the page (in the “Before” note) is a description of your project as it is most often written: “team of professionals”, “the provision of quality services”, “personalized approach”. Rewrite it in plain, informative style right on the page.

1. In the lead paragraph, say in two or three short sentences what you do and for whom. No judgments, no clichés.
2. In each list item, replace the ellipsis in the fact paragraph with a checkable fact: a number, a deadline, a document, a name or an example. If you are only inventing a project, put in a believable fact for now and mark it in your head as “check this”.
3. Don’t delete the “Before” note: the before-and-after pair will be useful at the end of the part, when you put all the techniques together.

The check will find the most typical judgments and officialese in your text and tell you where ellipses are left. But the real check is yours: read the paragraph aloud and ask yourself of every word, “What does it tell the reader?”

When the paragraphs are full of information, what is left is to put them in the right order: the main thing first, details after, and a headline that honestly says what’s inside. That’s the next lesson.