Using Plain English in Your Training Materials

The following information is taken largely from Clear Wriing and Literacy by Ruth Baldwin of the Ontario Literacy Coalition.

  1. One fundamental question to ask yourself is if the way the information is presented detracts in any way from the message itself. If so, then it is a warning sign about its clarity.
  2. One thing you can do to assist those with lower essential skill levels is to evaluate the written materials you’re asking them to deal with in terms of the complexity. You need to look at it from the point of view of clarity of the content and ease of navigation.
  3. Clarity of content involves both the way it’s written and the way it looks. It’s a way of presenting information so as to make it easy for everyone to read and understand.
  4. There are five things to consider when examining material:
    • overall appearance - design and layout
    • organization of material
    • language
    • sentence length and structure
    • tone - how you speak to the reader
  5. Heavy blocks of text or too much information crammed into a page is difficult to face and hard to process. Where possible, add white space to the document by reducing the number of text lines on a page, adjusting the width of the paragraphs, etc.
  6. Consider using a serif font of average size (10 to 12 point), such as the one used in the text of this document or any newspaper: it’s the most readable. Sans serif text, such as Arial (e.g. Arial) font, is more difficult to read.
  7. The lettering should be in upper and lower case versus only upper case.
  8. Graphics, charts and tables must be clear and well-presented. If they are not, it defeats their purpose of augmenting text.
  9. Consider whether or not the paragraphs should be full justified, as sometimes this creates gaps between words which makes them harder for the eye to process. Ragged-right text (left justified) is considered by some to be the most readable.
  10. Always make sure that photocopies are of the best quality possible.
  11. Ease of navigation is often overlooked. Many people have difficulties just trying to find information in documents. Try to see if the document has a good table of contents, if it’s clearly numbered and if it is well-divided into logical chunks. If a document is difficult to navigate, you’ll have to explicitly teach the navigation system to the learners.