Sometimes less really is more. When you’re communicating the results of a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) or Material Circularity Indicator (MCI), short words, simple sentences and active verbs will make complex concepts easier to understand. Trans-Tasman governments recognise the value of plain language too. New Zealand’s Plain Language Act 2022 requires plain English in official documents and websites.
At thinkstep-anz we’re the first to admit that the sustainability industry is awash with big, tricky words. Carbon sequestration. (Plain English translation: Capturing and storing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.) Materiality. (What matters most to your organisation.) Integrated reporting. (Showing how your organisation uses all its resources to create value.)
Knowing that sustainability terms could be a barrier to our clients, we’ve made plain English a big part of our work.
What is plain English?
This is our thinkstep-anz definition: plain English is simple, concise, personal language that makes our technical findings easy for our clients to read, understand and act on. It’s the difference between saying these two things:
| Impenetrable (and not something we’ve ever written!) | Plain English |
| thinkstep-anz consider your targets are in alignment with the core components of the plan and their achievement will be impactful in terms of both environmental and social outcomes. | We believe your targets support your plan. Achieving them will meet your environmental and social outcomes. |
Why we value plain English
1. We want our sustainability work to have an impact
To ensure it does, we need to make sure that decision-makers like CEOs, CFOs, directors and business owners on both sides of the Tasman can understand our technical findings and act on them. Concepts like Global Warming Potential and eutrophication mean little to most people. So we translate our technical findings – twice. First, we convert them to business concepts that decision-makers understand, like market share, risk and investor confidence. Then we translate our documents into plain English, including the executive summaries of our reports and the case studies we produce for our clients.
2. We want to help our clients avoid ‘greenwash’
Organisations need to share their sustainability stories without risking greenwash. Plain English helps. Clients can rely on the documents we produce and use them in their communications. They don’t need to alter them. The result? Less risk of damaging their brand or facing fines. Australia’s Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) and New Zealand’s Commerce Commission have greenwash in their sights. Both recommend using plain English to reduce the risk. In the ACCC’s words: Use language which the average member of the public can understand.
3. We want to ‘demystify’ sustainability
Communicating in plain English helps us reach an audience beyond our clients who might otherwise see sustainability as a ‘dark art’. If we’re to meet the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – environmental, social and economic – sustainability must go ‘mainstream’. We all need to understand what sustainability is (and isn’t), why it matters, how we can contribute and the progress we’re making.
Our plain English tips
We’re fans of author Stephen King’s 10% rule (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft). King is a ruthless editor who cuts 10% of words between the first and second drafts of every book. The tools he uses? The plain English tools we use too. Here are some examples.
1. Make your verbs work for you. Avoid the passive voice. Replace long Latin-based nouns with simple verbs. (Assess your carbon impacts. Don’t do an assessment of them.)
2. Use dinner table language. Stick to short, simple words and phrases. (Include transport emissions in your LCA, not transportation emissions.) We know some sustainability jargon is here to stay. But business jargon goes! We want to purge our collective writing of terms like human capital, pain points and drilling down on the data.
3. Ditch the padding. Leave out words that add nothing. Our favourite reject? Key. (Key issues. Key findings. The word’s overused.)
King’s hot on scrapping adverbs. (Whether you’ve overused a word or totally overused a word, the result’s the same.)
4. Help your readers navigate your documents. Use a new paragraph for every new idea, headers to signpost the way, and bullet points to summarise lists of ideas.
5. Finally, we love this Kingism: Leave out the boring parts and kill your darlings. If it doesn’t add anything, it doesn’t feature.
Good design goes hand-in-hand with plain English writing
Good design and plain English share many principles: Keep it simple. Highlight what matters. Make things easy for your reader. Less is more.
Our Creative Team recommend adopting a ‘visual hierarchy’ that uses techniques like font sizes, colour and icons to highlight main messages. Infographics strip away ‘noise’ to explain a complex topic. White space is your friend and gives your writing ‘clear air’ to breathe. Please join us on our mission to make being more sustainable something we can all understand – and act on.
thinkstep-anz won three Plain Language Awards
Our in-house Communication and Creative Team won three awards in the trans-Tasman 2022 Plain Language Awards:
- Best Plain Language Technical Communicator
- Best Plain English Annual Report
- Best Plain Language Document – Private Sector
The Awards recognise how we help our clients (and our business) share sustainability stories, galvanise stakeholders and report sustainability progress. They are run by the WriteMark Plain English Awards Trust and recognise plain language champions in Australia and New Zealand.