Plain English

Plain English (also referred to as layman's terms or plain language) is a generic term for communication in English that emphasizes clarity, brevity, and the avoidance of technical language—particularly in relation to official government or business communication.

The goal is to write in a way that is easily understood by the target audience: clear and straightforward, appropriate to their reading skills and knowledge, free of wordiness, cliché, and needless jargon. It often involves using native Anglo-Saxon, or Germanic, words instead of those derived from Latin and Greek (see linguistic purism in English).

Etymology

The term derives from the 16th-century idiom, "in plain English", meaning "in clear, straightforward language".

History

United Kingdom

In 1946, writer George Orwell wrote an impassioned essay, "Politics and the English Language", criticising what he saw as the dangers of "ugly and inaccurate" contemporary written English – particularly in politics where pacification can be used to mean "...defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets...". Two years later Sir Ernest Gowers, a distinguished civil servant, was asked by HM Treasury to provide a guide to officials on avoiding pompous and over-elaborate writing. He wrote, "writing is an instrument for conveying ideas from one mind to another; the writer's job is to make his reader apprehend his meaning readily and precisely."