Plain English isn’t about dumbing things down. It’s about making sure the person reading your post understands it first time, without needing to reread it or look anything up. For public sector comms, this really matters, because the person reading your post might be trying to find out if their bins are collected this week or whether a community event is happening, not reading a paragraph written for a committee report.

Why it’s harder on social than anywhere else

You’ve got less space, a shorter attention span to work with, and often information that started life as policy or legal wording before it reached you. The job is translation, not summarising. A shorter version of jargon is still jargon. It can be hard to make complex ideas clear, simple, accessible, and short.

This guide gives you practical help to change your wording so it’s easier to read for everyone. We’ll cover common jargon swaps, give you some examples of before-and-afters, and what to do when you absolutely can’t change the wording. Let’s get into it.

Cut the noun strings. “Household waste collection service disruption” becomes “your bin collection is delayed.”

Use “you” and “we.” Not “residents are advised,” but “you’ll need to.”

One idea per sentence. And per post. If you’re using “and” or a comma to join two separate pieces of information, split it. The same goes for whole posts. If you’ve got two unrelated updates, say, a bus route change and separate news that cycle hire is up and running in the area, that’s two posts, not one. Yes they’re both related to travel, but bundling them together confuses the messaging, mixes audiences, and means neither will land. 

Say what happens next, not just what happened. “The road is closed” is only half the post. People want to know what to do about it.

Read it out loud. If you wouldn’t say it to someone at a bus stop or in the pub, rewrite it.

Download our free guide for more easy phrases to swap when you are having to rewrite so many complicated, jargonistic pieces. Sometimes it’s easy to miss them when you’re seeing and dealing with them so often.

There’s a point where cutting words stops being clarity and starts being loss. If a post ends up so short that it drops a genuine caveat, like eligibility rules, a deadline, or a safety detail, that’s not plain English anymore, that’s just wrong. The test isn’t “is this the shortest version,” it’s “does this still tell the truth completely.”

There’s also a tone consideration here. Overly simple language on something serious, a bereavement, a safeguarding issue, a genuine emergency, can come across as flippant rather than accessible. Plain English still needs to match the weight of what you’re saying. “Sorry to hear that” doesn’t cut it as a response to a serious complaint, however short and human it sounds.

A rough check: if a colleague who knows the subject reads your simplified version and says “yes, but you’ve missed X,” you’ve cut too much. If they say “yes, that’s it, just shorter,” you’ve got it right.

Around 18% of adults in England, roughly 6.6 million people, have very poor literacy skills, meaning they can understand short, familiar texts but struggle with anything more complex, according to National Literacy Trust data. You’ll often see the claim that “the average UK adult reads at a 9 year old’s level” doing the rounds online. Worth treating that one with some caution, even the National Literacy Trust hasn’t been able to confirm exactly where it originated, so it’s more of a widely repeated stat than a solid fact.

What the 18% figure tells you is that plain English isn’t a ‘nice to have’ for a meaningful chunk of your audience, it’s the only version they can actually use. And it helps everyone else too, someone scrolling half concentrating on their phone gets the same benefit as someone who finds reading genuinely difficult.

• Hemingway Editor (hemingwayapp.com), free to use in browser. Paste your text in and it’ll flag long sentences, passive voice, and overly complex words, plus give you a rough reading grade level.
• Microsoft Word’s built in readability checker, under spelling and grammar settings, gives you a Flesch reading ease score if you’d rather not use a separate tool.
• Ask an AI tool to simplify it for you. If you’ve drafted something and it still feels dense, try prompting something like “rewrite this so a 12 year old could understand it, keep the meaning exact.” A useful second pass, not a replacement for writing it plainly yourself the first time.
• Orlo’s built-in tools can help you speak plainly. Use the AI caption generator to get a first draft down faster, then the AI alt text generator to make sure your image descriptions are just as plain English as your captions.  Content can be checked and approved in the calendar before it’s scheduled, so nothing goes out without a second pair of eyes, and because everything sits in one shared calendar, it’s easier to keep tone consistent across a whole team, not just one person’s posts.

• • Would this make sense to someone with no context at all?
  • Have you used “you” somewhere in it?
  • Is there a next step, and is it obvious?
  • Could you say it out loud to a friend without changing the wording?

Plain English doesn’t mean losing authority. If anything, a resident is more likely to trust an organisation that talks to them plainly than one that hides behind formal language when something’s gone wrong.