Plain language: why clear writing is a science, not a style

Plain language writing sets a testable goal for text: a reader gets the message on the first pass. Literacy scholars define it as communication an audience can understand the first time they read or hear it, per Wikipedia’s entry as updated in 2026. The field earns the word science through measurement, though parts of its evidence base remain thin. The number came before the rules. In 1975, Rudolf Flesch and J. Peter Kincaid scored texts by word and sentence length and mapped the result to a United States school grade level, per Wikipedia’s entry. Their Flesch-Kincaid test still screens documents today. The site’s literacy coverage follows where text difficulty and reader skill meet. Law followed the measurement. The United States required federal agencies to write plainly with the Plain Writing Act of 2010, and agency rewrites now swap clause stacks for short sentences. The same checking habit helps outside government, as in how to check a health claim in five minutes.

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