Books

Cutts, M. (2020). Oxford guide to plain English (5th ed.). Oxford University Press.

This is the book to get to start your Plain English journey. It is a strong guide to the overall concept of writing in Plain English. The guidelines are easy to understand and completely explain why they apply to Plain English writing. The examples used include Cutts' rewriting process and clearly show how to approach cleaning up messy writing.

Garner, B. A. (2013). Legal writing in plain English (2nd ed.) University of Chicago Press.

This book is great for those who really want to dig deep into practicing plain writing concepts. The concepts can be applied to most all situations despite the focus on legal documents.

Greene, A. E. (2013). Writing science in plain English. University of Chicago Press.

This book has very helpful exercises. Chapter 2 has a good explanation of pre-writing which most other books overlook. Focus on the first 6 chapters. The rest focuses a little too directly with writing scientific research papers.

Willerton, R. (2015.) Plain language and ethical action: A dialogic approach to technical content in the twenty-first century. Routledge.

This book will interest those who want to look at whether or not plain language is an ethical necessity. Willerton also details how specific entities have used plain language ethically. It focuses mostly on Willerton’s BUROC model which he proposes as a way to determine when plain language should be ethically applied. Because of this, it focuses almost exclusively on governmental and health-related bureaucracies.

Chapter two: Overview of Ethics in Technical and Professional Communication Literature would be interesting to those wanting to know more about how ethics fits into technical communication. His discussion of Kant, and Buber’s I-It versus the I-You model, as they apply to plain language is interesting and aids in understanding how to approach plain writing. However, a reader looking for actionable information might want to look elsewhere.