On Writing Plainly
Plain language isn’t a dumbing-down. It’s a form of respect — for the reader’s time, for the idea itself, for the possibility that someone outside your field might care about what you’ve found. Most technical writing fails at the first sentence, not because the author lacks knowledge but because they’ve confused complexity with credibility.
The temptation is understandable. You’ve spent years learning a vocabulary that encodes real distinctions. Dropping it feels like losing precision. But there’s a difference between precision and opacity, and much of what passes for the former is actually the latter.
The test I use: can I say what I mean in a single declarative sentence? Not a hedge, not a qualification, not a “it depends” — just the thing. If I can’t, I probably don’t understand it well enough yet. Writing is thinking. The sentence that refuses to form is telling you something.