Windsor

Just a couple of days ago I took a company training called “Plain English”. As many company web-trainings are I really thought this was not going to be any different.

To my surprise this was very entertaining. Not only did I learn, I was able to be aware for two straight hours.

I am not a native English speaker even though it was taught to me at a very early age. There is a ton of cultural difference on how I (we) write in Spanish, which is a more elaborate, fancy and confusing way. Yes, not many writers take care of their readers.

I found out that it is better to write in a simpler, colloquial (inside joke, ha!), plain way than adding adjectives one on top of the other. The benefits seem plenty. Writing this way is supposed to keep your readers interested on what you are trying to communicate, it also states that there are more chances to keep them all the way to the end.

I had a chance to comment about this with an English friend. He raised his eyebrows and said, “those are Americanisms!” -end of quote. Since I am a citizen of the world, I didn’t pay much attention to his mock. For much I care about him, I know he can be obnoxious just for fun, even though he is not Irish. (unconscious biased? another joke.)

One of the lessons mentioned that if you address complex subjects to others, explain them in a simple way like if you were talking to your family, the message will get across. There is a readability index (The Flesch–Kincaid) which points how hard or easy is to comprehend a text. The target index score for plain English is 70-60 which correspond to school level eight or nine.

Wondering why Reader’s Digest has been around since 1922 and has a total circulation (Yr. 2020) of 3,029,039?. Plain English!

Item	Readability Index (the higher # the easiest)	Item	Readability Index (the higher # the easiest)
Comics	92	Newsweek	50
Consumer ads in magazines	82	Wall Street Journal	43
Movie Screen	75	Harvard Business Review	43
Seventeen	67	New York Times	39
Reader’s Digest	65	New York Review of Books	35
Sports Illustrated	63	Harvard Law Review	32
New York Daily News	60	Standard auto insurance policy	10
Atlantic Monthly	57	Internal Revenue Code	minus 6
Time	52

Hopefully you made it this far, which means I did good on my training! I added a video from a restaurant in Windsor in the UK, to remind my Englishman friend that plain English is not only “Americanisms”…

Either way I had to add something so…