Hi Mitchell and Matteo,

This is an area that greatly interests me. I have written a few things about this that might be useful to you. I recently wrote a critical review of attempts by plain language advocates to create standards. All done with the best of intentions, but…

Below is an extract

> …We were asked to redesign other documents that had similarly been ‘improved’ by plain language, and our testing found nearly all of them performing poorly. People were unable to use them appropriately: they could not find what they were looking for, or follow instructions correctly.
> 
> This was a serious problem. But there was more. Plain language advocates reported that when presented with a document written in plain language style, people felt confident in their capacity to understand it. Theses same researchers also reported, however, that this confidence was misplaced: people misinterpreted some of the text, quite unaware they were making mistakes.3
> 
> This finding worried us, and we wrote about it in our Newsletter4and in the professional literature5.
> 
> I was concerned that the plain language style had at least three possible unacceptable consequences:
> 
> 	• Users confidently believing that they ‘understand’ the documents could make serious errors (many such errors were revealed in our testing).
> 	• Users failing to make sense of a ‘plain language’ document might conclude that they must be stupid if they couldn’t understand it, and would, as a consequence, be less likely to complain about poor communication as they would feel it was their fault.
> 	• It is quite common in our time to stamp plain language documents, certifying that they are written in plain language. The result is a perfect public relations outcome, suppressing the vital debate and criticism on which civic society depends, and on which much of the rhetoric of plain language advocates depend. An ironic twist!

> My concern was, and still is, both practical and ethical. Just imagine how many unusable plain language documents are in circulation around the world. Millions of documents dressed in emperor’s clothes parading before us, and we remain silent.

https://communication.org.au/plain-language-standards/

There is, of course much more to say about this, including the corporate use of PL to deliberately mislead.

David

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