Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to explain complicated things in writing, and how to help people actually understand them. Two people have inspired that reflection: Ylva Bjelle and Randall Munroe. They come from very different backgrounds, but both emphasize that writing too often relies on overly technical or specialized vocabulary.

I first encountered Ylva Bjelle when she gave a talk about reaching more readers by using plain language, easy-to-read writing, and accessible document design. I enjoyed the presentation so much that I picked up her book Nå fler med dina texter. I would happily recommend it to anyone who reads Swedish. The book is full of practical advice and challenges the idea that government and legal writing must be filled with complex technical jargon.

A few takeaways from Ylva Bjelle’s book:

• Replace words that are hard to understand.
• Use the active voice and address the reader as “you”.
• Start with what’s most important.
• Split long words into several shorter, like you would in a crossword puzzle clue. Note: in Swedish, you can make really, really long words by connecting several words together!
• Use a spacious layout divided into sections with clear headings.
• Avoid long rows of text as well as long blocks of text.
• Make sure to use a legible font. Always check, is there a clear difference between 1 (one) and l (lowercase L).

Around the same time, I found myself giggling at Randall Munroe’s Thing Explainer. The book describes complicated things using only the 1000 most common English words. It is funny when he presents an elevator as a “lifting room”, a camera as a “picture taker”, and washing machines as “boxes that make clothes smell better”, but the constraint reveals something important. It is clear that the limitation forces a different way of thinking. You can’t hide behind technical jargon. You have to understand an idea well enough to explain it in everyday language, and this makes it easier for more people to understand – in the general case, at least, not necessarily always so in Munroe’s examples where “washing machine” would probably more easily have painted a clear picture in the mind of the reader.

Randall Munroe (you might know him as the XKCD guy) has created a tool where you can enter your text and it will mark words that are not within the set of the 1000 most used. While I don’t necessarily recommend limiting yourself to only those words, the tool challenges you to think of alternatives.

Visit Simple Writer at: https://xkcd.com/simplewriter

I will close this with a quote from Randall Munroe, which points to something both he and Ylva Bjelle emphasize: the tendency to overcomplicate our writing when simple, direct language would be enough.

“I’ve spent a lot of my life worried that people will think I don’t know enough. Sometimes, that worry has made me use big words when I don’t need to.”

Randall Munroe, from the foreword (“Page before the book starts”) of Thing Explainer