Writing clearly is harder than it looks
Most people write the way they were taught in school, which means they write like they're trying to impress a teacher who grades on complexity. Plain Style does the opposite. It's not a personality trick or a tone down. It's a set of rules about how to get information from one brain to another without the reader having to do unnecessary work. I spent three years rewriting policy documents for a government department. The first batch came back with comments like "too casual" and "lacks gravitas." I kept trying to add words back in because someone somewhere told me that formal language carried more authority. It didn't. The second batch had zero revisions. The difference was almost entirely structural, not stylistic.
What Plain Style A Guide To Written English Actually Is
Plain Style is the Australian Government's Plain Language Guide. It was developed by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and first published around 2013. The core idea is that government communication should be accessible to everyone, not just people who are comfortable with bureaucratic register. The guide covers structure, word choice, grammar, and formatting. It applies to everything from website copy to legislative instruments, though some document types have more flexibility than others. The thing most people miss about it is that it's not about simplifying content. It's about removing obstacles between the writer and the reader. You don't dumb down your message. You make sure the packaging isn't getting in the way.
The basics, but in practice
The guide has a few anchor principles. Write in active voice. Use short sentences. Avoid jargon unless you've defined it. Put the most important information first. These sound obvious until you try to apply them to a document where the audience includes both lawyers and residents who are trying to figure out if they qualify for a grant. Active voice is the easiest one to implement and the one people resist the most. A typical bureaucratic sentence runs like this: "It is considered by the committee that an application may be submitted by eligible persons." That's twelve words doing the job of six. "The committee considers that eligible persons may submit an application" is cleaner. But here's the thing nobody tells you about active voice in government writing: sometimes the actor genuinely doesn't matter or isn't known. In those cases, pushing for active voice creates false specificity. The workaround is knowing when to drop the actor entirely rather than inventing one. "Applications are accepted" is fine when there's no specific person responsible for the accepting. Short sentences don't mean choppy sentences. They mean one idea per sentence. A twenty-five-word sentence that tracks a single logical chain is better than an eight-word sentence that leaves the reader connecting dots. I once rewrote a page where every sentence was under ten words because someone had misread the guidance as a mandate for minimalism. The result read like a instructions manual for assembly furniture. Lengthen the sentences back up. Keep the ideas clean.
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Structure is where most people fail
The biggest leverage point in Plain Style isn't word choice. It's document structure. Most writers lead with background or context. Plain Style says lead with the answer. If someone is reading a page about applying for something, the first thing they should see is whether they're eligible and what they need to do. Everything else comes after. I used a simple test for this. I'd print a draft and highlight the first three sentences in yellow. If the highlight didn't tell someone everything they needed to know to decide whether to keep reading, I rewrote the opening. This cut my revision cycles from about four passes down to two. Sometimes one. The guide also recommends using headings that tell the reader what's coming, not headings that sound clever. "How to apply" beats "The Application Process Demystified." The latter sounds like a blog post written by someone who thinks their topic is surprising. It isn't.
Word choice that actually matters
There are lists of words to avoid in the guide. Understandable, however, utilised, facilitate. These are the usual suspects. But the deeper issue is nominalisation. That's turning verbs into nouns. "Make a determination" instead of "determine." "Provide assistance" instead of "assist." Nominalisations inflate sentence length and obscure who is doing what. They also create a rhythm that signals formality to readers even when the meaning is identical. The counter-intuitive part: some nominalisations are actually more precise than their verbal counterparts. "The implementation of the framework" can carry a meaning that "implementing the framework" doesn't, because the noun version lets you attach modifiers and refer back to the action as a thing. Don't eliminate nominalisations. Audit them. If you can replace it with a verb without losing meaning, do it. If the noun is doing work, keep it. Jargon is the harder problem. Not because people use it intentionally, but because domain language becomes invisible to the people who use it every day. I was rewriting a health document once and used the word "assessment" in a sentence. A member of the public reading it through a focus group asked what kind of assessment we meant. An X-ray. A psychological evaluation. A eligibility check. The word meant nothing to them. I added a parenthetical definition and moved on. This is the pattern that saves documents: assume the reader has general competence but zero domain familiarity.
Formatting choices that change everything
Lists are underused. Any time you have three or more items in a sentence, convert it to a list. Bullet points or numbered steps, depending on whether order matters. A paragraph that says "You need to provide your name, address, date of birth, and Medicare number" is harder to scan than a vertical list. People reading government content are rarely reading linearly. They're scanning for what applies to them. White space matters more than people think. Dense blocks of text signal effort. Readers subconsciously estimate how much work a document will require based on its visual density. A page that looks approachable gets read. A page that looks like a wall gets skimmed or abandoned. Short paragraphs. One or two sentences max. Leave room between sections.
Where Plain Style breaks down
It doesn't work for everything. Legal drafting has constraints that Plain Style explicitly carves out. If you're writing legislation, contracts, or regulatory instruments, the need for precision often overrides clarity. Ambiguity in a contract is sometimes a feature, not a bug. Plain Style acknowledges this and provides exceptions for legal text. The trick is knowing when you're actually in that territory. A lot of writers use "it's legal language" as an excuse to skip clarity rules in documents that aren't actually legal instruments. A policy memo is not a contract. A procedural guide is not an Act of Parliament. Another limitation: Plain Style assumes a standard reading level. For audiences with lower literacy or for documents in communities where English is a second language, you may need to go further than the guide recommends. Shorter sentences. More examples. Glossaries. The principles still apply, but the bar for accessibility shifts.
Plain Style A Guide To Written English in daily use
The guide itself is available for free from the Australian Government resource site. It's updated periodically. The current version covers both written and spoken communication, which is a useful expansion. Most people only read the written section, but the guidance on presenting information orally follows the same logic. For practical application, here's what I do now before sending anything out. I run it through a readability checker first. Not to hit a target score, but to spot sentences that are clearly too complex. Then I do the reverse read, which means reading the document backwards from the last paragraph to the first. This strips away the narrative flow and forces you to evaluate each sentence on its own merit. Sentences that fall apart when disconnected from the surrounding context usually reveal structural problems you'd otherwise gloss over. Then I hand it to someone outside my team and ask them to find the one thing the document is asking them to do. If they can't name it in ten seconds, the document isn't ready. This process takes about twenty minutes for a standard document. A full rewrite from scratch used to take me two hours. The time isn't saved on writing. It's saved on the back-and-forth that happens when a document doesn't do what it claims to do.
Common mistakes even experienced writers make
Overusing transition words. Plain Style documents don't need "furthermore" or "consequently." They need clear logic. If sentence two follows from sentence one, the relationship is usually visible without a bridge word. Transition words are often placeholders for weak structure. Misusing headings as decoration. Every heading should earn its place. If removing a heading doesn't change how the reader navigates the document, it shouldn't be there. Writing for the wrong audience level. This is the one that costs the most time. You'll know you've done it when your draft reads clearly to you but confuses everyone else. The fix is the same: get it in front of someone who isn't familiar with the topic and watch where they stumble.
Plain Style isn't a style. It's the absence of barriers. The best Plain Style document is the one people don't notice they're reading because it gets out of their way fast enough.
