Varieties of Plain Language

Proceedings of Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, pages 1180–1187 Sep 1–3, 2021. https://doi.org/10.26615/978-954-452-072-4_133 1180 Varieties of Plain Language Allen Riddell Indiana University Bloomington Bloomington, Indiana, USA riddella@indiana.edu Yohei Igarashi University of Connecticut Storrs, Connecticut, USA yohei.igarashi@uconn.edu Abstract Many organizations seek or need to produce documents that are written plainly. In the United States, the “Plain Writing Act of 2010” requires that many federal agencies’ docu- ments for the public are written in plain En- glish. In particular, the government’s Plain Language Action and Information Network (“PLAIN”) recommends that writers use short sentences and everyday words, as does the Se- curities and Exchange Commission’s “Plain English Rule.” Since the 1970s, American plain language advocates have moved away from readability measures and favored usabil- ity testing and document design considera- tions. But in this paper we use quantitative measures of sentence length and word diffi- culty that (1) reveal stylistic variation among PLAIN’s exemplars of plain writing, and (2) help us position PLAIN’s exemplars relative to documents written in other kinds of accessible English (e.g., The New York Times, Voice of America Special English, and Wikipedia) and one academic document likely to be perceived as difficult. Uncombined measures for sen- tences and vocabulary—left separate, unlike in traditional readability formulas—can com- plement usability testing and document design considerations, and advance knowledge about different types of plainer English. 1 Introduction The quality of being “plain” has been held up as a stylistic ideal in English prose since the later sev- enteenth century (Guillory, 2017). This ideal has shown remarkable persistence (Cutts, 2020). In the United States, the plain language movement took off in the 1940s, and plainness remains a stylistic goal for many kinds of organizations in their writ- ing on websites and other publications: medical and public health information, insurance policies, instructions to jurors, loan agreements, and Social Security benefits statements, to name just a few (Schriver, 2017; Cutts, 2020). Since the passage of the Plain Writing Act of 2010, American federal agencies must use “plain language,” defined as “writing that is clear, concise, well-organized, and follows other best practices appropriate to the subject or field and intended audience” (United States Congress, 2010). Affect- ing all 2.1 million employees of the U.S. Federal government (Jennings and Nagel, 2020), the Act requires that agencies use this kind of language in many of their documents for the public, train their employees in this style, and demonstrate their compliance with the Act.1 There are several co- gent rationales for plain language use: it grants access to understandable information to a greater number of people with differing literacy levels; it saves agencies the labor and money involved in clearing up confusing communications; and it may help to restore citizens’ trust in public-serving organizations, an especially important agenda in our era of misinformation, disinformation, and pro- paganda (Schriver, 2017). If we add to the U.S. government’s plain writing imperative the similarly simple writing style espoused by Big Tech in all of its apps, websites, and documentation, we …

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