Plain Style and Word Choice
Plain style makes the argument easy to follow by preferring concrete words, active verbs, and sentences that say one thing at a time. · 12 min
Plain style is not plain thinking. A clear sentence can carry a hard idea; what it refuses to do is make the idea harder than it is. Three habits produce it. Prefer the concrete word to the abstract one. Prefer the active verb — someone doing something — to a noun built from a verb. And let each sentence say one thing at a time, so the reader takes the argument in one clean step per sentence. None of this thins your meaning. It removes the fog between the meaning and the reader, which is the only thing plain style ever cuts.
Guess before you learn
Which sentence states its point most plainly?
The second says who does what — this report recommends — in five words. The others bury the same point under nouns built from verbs (reduction, implementation) and throat-clearing (it is the recommendation of, with respect to). Plain style is not shorter for its own sake; it is shorter because it stops hiding the actor and the action.
9–12
3–5
Plain writing uses words you already know and verbs that do something. The team decided is plain. A decision was reached by the team hides the team behind extra words. Ask who is doing what, then say that first.
Try to make each sentence carry one idea. If a sentence has three ideas stuffed in, the reader has to unpack it. Give each idea a sentence of its own and the reader keeps up easily.
6–8
Plain style is a set of choices that keep an argument easy to follow. Three do most of the work. First, concrete words: a fire truck is easier to picture than a response vehicle. Second, active verbs: prefer the mayor vetoed the budget to a veto was issued, because the active version names the actor and the action. Third, one idea per sentence: a sentence that tries to say three things forces the reader to sort them; three short sentences do the sorting instead.
The common enemy of all three is the nominalization — a verb turned into a noun, like make a decision for decide or give consideration to for consider. Nominalizations bury the action and drag in extra words (make, give, a, to). Turn the noun back into a verb and the sentence shortens and clears at once.
9–12
Plain style is a discipline of choices, not a reading grade. Start with the verb: a strong, specific verb (vetoed, collapsed, doubled) does work that a weak verb plus a noun (issued a veto, underwent a collapse) only pretends to. The nominalization — a verb frozen into a noun — is the most common source of foggy prose, because it hides who does what and pulls in filler to prop it up. Next, prefer the concrete to the abstract where the argument allows; a reader grasps a named thing faster than a category. Finally, govern sentence load: one main assertion per sentence, with detail branching to the right of it, keeps the reader moving instead of holding clauses in memory. Plainness is what remains when the fog is gone — the meaning underneath can be as hard as it needs to be.
K–2
Say it the short way. Not I am in possession of a dog. Just I have a dog. Short words you know are best. Big words that hide your meaning are not.
Pick the word that shows a picture. The dog ran shows a picture. Movement occurred does not. Show the picture.
Undergrad
The tradition behind plain style runs from Orwell's Politics and the English Language to Williams's Style and Pinker's The Sense of Style, and the technical core is remarkably stable: characters as subjects, their actions as verbs. Williams's formulation is the sharpest — a sentence reads clearly when its grammatical subjects name the story's main characters and its verbs name those characters' crucial actions. Prose turns opaque when this mapping breaks: when actions hide inside nominalizations and the real actors vanish into prepositional phrases or disappear altogether. Passive voice earns its place when the receiver of an action matters more than its doer, or when the doer is unknown; abused, it is simply another way to lose the actor. The point is never a smaller vocabulary. It is a grammar that puts the reader's understanding first, which in argument is not a courtesy but a condition of being followed.
Postgrad
The empirical backbone of plain-style advice is processing cost. Readers parse incrementally, and each design choice either lowers or raises the load: nominalizations force the reader to reconstruct a predicate hidden inside a noun; long left-branching subjects hold a verb in suspense across intervening material; abstract terms defer the reference a concrete term supplies at once. The measurable correlates — reading time, regressions, comprehension accuracy — favor the plain choices with fair consistency, which is why the tradition's rules of thumb keep being rediscovered. But plainness is a constraint, not an objective function. Technical registers legitimately trade some transparency for precision, compression, or the signaling of expertise, and a naive always active, always concrete can flatten necessary distinctions. The mature skill is to know the cost of each departure from plainness and to pay it only when the argument genuinely buys something in return.
nominalization
A verb turned into a noun: decide becomes make a decision, consider becomes give consideration to. Nominalizations hide the action and pull in filler words. Turning the noun back into a verb is the fastest way to make a sentence plain.
The working method is three passes over a sentence you want to make plain. First, find the real action and the one performing it; if the action is hiding in a noun — a reduction, an improvement — free it back into a verb. Second, make that performer the subject and the freed verb the main verb, so the sentence says who does what up front. Third, check the load: if the sentence still carries two or three separate assertions, break it so each says one thing. Then read the result aloud. Plain prose survives being spoken; tangled prose runs out of breath.
Rewrite a bloated sentence in plain style — the steps fade as you master them
Actor: the committee. Action hidden in belief → believes.
→ fewer meetings; → improve productivity
The committee believes fewer meetings would improve productivity.
22 words become 8 — same claim, no fog.
Why is this true?
Why prefer an active verb to a noun built from that same verb?
Because the noun (a nominalization) hides the action inside a naming word and needs a weak helper verb and extra articles to stand up — make a decision for decide. The active verb states the action directly and names who performs it, so the reader sees who does what without unpacking anything. Plainer, shorter, and clearer at once.
That is the whole arc. You began with a topic, narrowed it to a question, answered the question in an arguable thesis, and defended that thesis in paragraphs that each do one job, on evidence that fits, inside openings and closings that promise and deliver. Then you revised — the argument's shape first, the dead weight next, the sentences last. An essay is not written in one motion; it is built, tested, and cleared until the argument stands in plain view. You now have the whole sequence. What remains is to use it, on a question you actually care to answer.
Practice — new ink and old, interleaved
1.Which sentence is plainest?
2.From folio 14, in one sentence: which revision comes first, fixing the argument's shape or fixing the sentences, and why?
3.What does a reverse outline reveal?
4.These three sentences belong to one paragraph but are scrambled. Put them in the order that builds a single idea: claim first, then its supports.
- Young children learn more from play and sleep than from worksheets at night.
- Making it optional lets families choose what their child actually needs.
- Homework should be optional in the early grades.
5.From folio 5, in one sentence: how many ideas should a single paragraph carry?
6.In one sentence: rewrite 'A decision to cancel the trip was made by the teachers' in plain style, and say what you changed.
7.From folio 15: a paragraph is beautifully written but serves no part of your thesis. What do you do?