Plain-language rewrite

What a plain-language rewrite is

A plain-language rewrite takes a live web page written in the vocabulary of the people who work at your company and writes it again in the vocabulary of the people who buy from you. The facts stay. The technical accuracy stays, and it is checked by somebody at your end who knows the subject. What changes is the words: the trade terms, the internal shorthand, the abstractions that made sense in a meeting and mean nothing to a stranger.

It is not simplification for its own sake, and nobody is written down to. Your reader is a competent adult who happens not to work in your field. A plumber reading about a warranty, a farmer reading about a financing term: neither needs a shorter word, they need the word they already use for the thing.

Some terms must stay. If a word is the correct name for something, has a legal meaning, or is what your buyer will search for and ask about, it stays and it is explained once, in the sentence where it first appears. Stripping out the real name of a thing is not plain language, it is a different kind of inaccuracy.

When you need one

You need one when a page is being explained on the phone. If your staff routinely translate a page for callers, the page is written in the wrong language and the phone call is the cost of that.

You need one when the writer was an expert. Engineers, lawyers, accountants, clinicians and developers write accurate pages that assume the reader shares a decade of background. The accuracy is worth keeping; the assumption is not.

You need one when the buyer and the specifier are different people. The page was written for the technical evaluator, and the person signing the cheque reads it too and understands none of it.

You do not need one if the sentences are simply long and the page is a wall of grey. That is readability improvement, which changes sentence and paragraph length and leaves your vocabulary exactly where it is. And if the material is a policy, letter, form or guide rather than a web page, the editing pillar handles it as plain-language editing: there I keep your document and change how it is said. Here I rewrite a page in place, in the site it lives in, with the page's job and the pages around it taken into account.

What I write

The work is done in a fixed order, because the vocabulary decisions have to be made before any sentence is written.

• The term list. Every specialist word on the page, sorted into three piles: replace, keep and explain, keep without comment because your buyer uses it too. You and your subject expert agree the list before the rewrite starts.
• The replacements. For every term in the first pile, the everyday phrase that means the same thing. Not a shorter word, the right one, tested against how your customers say it in emails and calls.
• The explanations. For everything in the second pile, one sentence at first use, written so a reader who already knows the term does not feel lectured.
• The rewritten page. Same facts, same claims, same structure unless the structure is part of the problem.
• The accuracy check. Your expert reads it against the original with the term list in hand, and anything they flag goes back.

What you get

The rewritten page. Ready for the site, with headings, body text, button labels, title tag and meta description in the same register as the body.

The agreed term list. One table: the old word, the new word, and the reason. This is the thing that makes the next page cheaper, because the decisions are already made.

A comparison document. The old page beside the new one, so the accuracy check is a reading job rather than an archaeology job.

A note on what was kept. The terms that stayed and why, so nobody removes them later thinking they were missed.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A company in Winnipeg sells commercial heat-recovery ventilation to building owners. Its main product page was written by the founder, a mechanical engineer, and it is accurate throughout. It refers to sensible and latent recovery, static pressure, cross-contamination and design airflow. Building owners phone to ask whether the thing will make the building cheaper to heat and whether it is noisy.

The term list runs to twenty-two entries. Fourteen are replaced: design airflow becomes how much air it moves, cross-contamination becomes stale air leaking back into fresh air. Five are kept and explained once each, including static pressure, because it appears on every quote and the buyer will meet it again. Three are kept without comment because building owners already use them. The rewritten page opens with heating cost and noise, because those are the two phone questions, and moves the recovery efficiency discussion below them without changing a single figure. The engineer's accuracy check produces two corrections, both about the explanation of latent recovery, and both are taken. The page is 40 words shorter and the term list is used on the next four product pages without another meeting.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. Which page, who reads it, who the subject expert is, and what your customers ask on the phone. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. The page or pages, the price and the dates, agreed before anything starts.
3. The term list. Two to three working days, then a short session with your expert to agree it. Nothing is written until that is settled.
4. The rewrite. Two to four working days for a page of ordinary length.
5. The accuracy check. Your expert reads the comparison document. Their corrections are made without argument.
6. Delivery. The final page, the term list, the comparison and the note on what was kept.

One to two weeks for a single page. A set of pages sharing one term list takes three to five weeks and costs far less per page than the first one.

What it costs

A plain-language rewrite is quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call, because the size of the job depends on the subject rather than the word count. What moves the number is how much specialist vocabulary the page carries, how many pages share the term list, and how much of your expert's time the accuracy check needs. The pricing page shows the four ways of working and how quotes are built, and the number is fixed in writing before the work begins.

What happens next

One page in plain language beside twenty that are not is a jarring site, so the term list is usually applied across the rest, either as further rewrites or through bringing the pages into one voice. The questions that surfaced during the term list almost always justify an FAQ page answering them properly. And where the same vocabulary problem runs through your documents as well as your site, plain-language editing handles those. This rewrite is complete work on its own, and nothing further is assumed.