This week, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) released their plain-language standard for written communication. This marks the first internationally accepted statement of what clear communication means. The movement towards plain language is important for how writers and editors work, so that’s what we’re covering this week! We’ll summarize the standard and consider a little how it applies in academia.
Plain Language
The general idea behind the ISO Plain Language Standard is that writing should put the reader’s needs first. It should be as easy to find useful, comprehensible information as possible given the needs, interests, and skills of the target audience. While the needs of the writer aren’t irrelevant, they are secondary to the reader’s needs.
Plain language is not the same as simple language. Whereas simple language aims to overcome comprehension or learning difficulties, plain language aims to present just what’s needed for the general reader in a specific context.
The standard gives four principles for plain language writing: relevance, findability, understanding, and usability. It also gives guidelines for interpreting and applying these principles in more specific contexts. While these principles are sound, applying them is deeply contextual and demands good judgment.
Relevance
Relevance means choosing information, formatting, and document types that help readers get what they need out of the document. In order to be relevant to the reader, it’s important to have a clear idea of who the target audience is. Writing for a government website to be used by the general public is different from writing a dissertation.
Findability
Findability means that readers should be able to easily find what they need. This principle concerns broad structure of a document: headings, through-lines, arguments, flow, pacing, and length.
Understanding
Understanding means that once readers find that they need, they should be able to easily understand the information. This principle concerns the most micro-level features of a document: word use, sentence length, paragraph structure, and overall cohesion.
Usability
Finally, usability means that readers can easily use the information. Usability depends on the target audience—i.e., the reader and their needs. Sometimes readers need specific pieces of information. sometimes they need frameworks. Sometimes they need details. And sometimes they need all of those things.
Plain Language in Academia
What does the plain language standard mean for academic editing, our corner of the editing world? Academic editing has been implicitly committed to plain language standards—that is certainly our practice. Nothing in the standard is absolutely new. However, academic writing has some unique tendencies that writing in general does not, and thinking about how to apply the principles is a non-trivial task.
Academics tend to struggle in three areas: structure, jargon, and complexity. We edit to move manuscripts into greater compliance with plain language standards. Academic writing is often structurally convoluted because the writing is often done under severe time constraints. This means that findability of information is compromised. Similarly, academics often default to jargon that’s understood among their peers, but that can get in the way of understanding for a (slightly) wider audience. Finally, academic ideas are often inherently complex. Most of our work is making suggestions on how to move away from jargon, towards clear structure, and away from complexity for the sake of complexity.
Judgment is Essential
Of course, standards can only go so far. One shouldn’t shoehorn a complex argument into a simple structure. Sometimes jargon is the most efficient way to convey information, depending on the audience. And research is often complex because it’s breaking new ground and so can’t be reviewed, reflected on, or digested in the way that established findings can. There’s no substitute for judgment and experience, either the writer’s or the editor’s!
There is much more to say about plain language standards in academia, and there are interesting intersections with material we have already covered. Stay tuned as we explore this terrain further.