As advocates continue to promote the benefits of communicating clearly, questions still arise about how to define plain language. What is plain language, and how do you know if your choices are plain enough? After defining plain language, I’d like to investigate whether jargon and technical language are compatible with plain language.

Since generative AI can produce polished text in seconds, it’s tempting to ask: Why write at all? If the end result, like a report, an email, a memo, or a presentation, looks the same whether written by a human or GenAI, why not just let the technology do the work? Because writing isn’t just about producing text. Writing is thinking.

Government proposals are a marathon of precision and persistence where every detail matters. Contract awards are guarded by a maze of technical specifications, multiple down-selection phases, and a fastidious panel of evaluators. These inherent challenges are compounded by the hyper-competitive nature of federal contracting, where there’s almost always a bigger fish.

Somewhere along the way, most of us have heard the advice, “good writing uses transitions.” So we picked up words like however, therefore, moreover, and in addition and started sprinkling them into our sentences like magic dust. Transitions, we were told, make writing flow.

If you’re a heartbroken poet living in an unheated garret in Paris, there’s no doubt your writing process includes suffering: the hours you spend gazing out the window, the inky splotches your fountain pen leaves on the vellum, the tear stains on the never-adequate rhymes, the crumpled drafts piling up on the floor.

Have you ever had your work edited by a grammar whiz and found a note scrawled in the margin reading “fused participle”? Like most people, you probably wondered what the heck that note meant. If you looked it up, you were confronted by a deluge of grammar terms—so you gave up. Don’t worry, we don’t blame you. It is confounding. But to write in formal prescriptive English, you must know what fused participles are and how to wrangle them.

It may seem efficient to use generative AI (GenAI) tools to write content for you. You’re busy. Maybe you’re not deeply invested in the final product. Maybe you just want to be done. However, GenAI often produces text that is bland, abstract, repetitive, obvious, and just awkward—especially compared to a human writer who knows the topic well.

I’m weird. I love editing. With a finished draft in hand, I’m eager to ask myself editing questions like

When you’re looking to cut words, that is a good target. It’s often redundant and space-wasting. But before your CTRL+F to delete every instance of that to get under page limits, reconsider. That is actually a complex word with multiple meanings and grammatical possibilities, which means sometimes that is grammatically necessary and sometimes it just makes your sentence much clearer.

Be verbs have earned a bad reputation for creating boring writing—but they’re not alone. Copula verbs (also known as linking verbs), which include be, seem, feel, become, and remain, also create bland sentences. Though these verbs can be useful, more often they’re just feeble verbs that attract wan adjectives and slow your sentences.