What’s the difference between awesome and average website content? For most IT and technology businesses (in fact, for any business), it’s how it’s written.
No-brainer, right? You must consider your audience, provide all the relevant information in a logical story-telling structure, use a friendly tone and active voice, optimize for SEO, keep the length optimal, etc., etc…
You are absolutely spot on. But here’s the ultimate secret recipe if you are writing on IT or tech topics. Use PLAIN ENGLISH.
So, what’s plain English? Plain English is just that: plain. You don’t use any jargons. You don’t fluff around with complicated words and long-winded sentences. You go straight to the point with as little text as feasible. At the same time, you don’t make it so terse or watered down that it doesn’t make sense. It’s communication at its finest if you ask us.
Want some examples? Here’s one sentence:
“Without centralized source control of infrastructure configuration tracking, it’s difficult to adhere to security & compliance requirements.”
How about we write it like this:
“You can’t guarantee security compliance without source-controlling your infrastructure configuration code.“
6 words less. That’s because source control is a centralized system for keeping your code in one place.
Another example:
“In a production environment, running each component of the stack by itself is recommended to ensure that you have replicas and a HA setup on essential elements like the backend and processors.“
33 words, one long sentence. Let’s edit this:
“We recommend running each stack component separately in production environments. This lets you create replicas of critical components like the backend and the processor for high availability.“
2 sentences, six words less. You get the picture.
So, forget those big words people need to look up in the dictionary. Get rid of those long sentences that baffle your readers. Break down those paragraphs that seem to go on and on forever. This is what we mean by plain English: it’s direct, conversational language. Use it to explain your concepts, how-tos, and call-to-actions.
Why is Tech-writing in Plain English So Important?
The short answer is that people understand clear messages. Remember that everyone receives communication differently. What might be crystal clear for one person can make absolutely no sense for another. For tech writing, that’s even truer. I could be a database specialist and never heard of Kubernetes. If your article is about running database instances on Kubernetes clusters, you need to remember that your readers—database engineers and DBAs—may not be familiar with the technology. So it’s best you provide some intro or at least a link to a page the reader can go to have an intro on Kubernetes.
By using plain English, you will save your reader time. And time is money. Ask yourself, what do you want from your tech blogs? The widest possible reach and readers coming back for more, no? And that’s what talking in simple terms gives you.
Top Tips for Tech Writing in Plain English
So, here are our tips for you:
Ensure your message follows a logical path. Write an article outline first, and think about how you will present your story. Every content has three parts: an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. Decide what you will talk about in each section. Here at ProDataSkills, we spend countless hours creating content outlines and honing them. In fact, this is one of the reasons our content is so successful. As authors create the outline for a story, they know exactly what they will write about, and our clients know what the story will look like. It helps authors do the initial research and know more about the topic.
Remember who your audience is. Do they respond to formal tones or slightly relaxed lingo? You could be writing a blog for a techie, and your language could be relaxed. But then, the whitepaper you are writing could be meant for C-level people, and you want a more neutral (note how I didn’t say “formal”) tone there. The trick is to strike a balance between the two. You can’t be mixing “users don’t” and “users do not” in the same article. You can’t have a mixture of neutral and casual tones together.
Talk to the reader using easy conversational-style sentences. This goes whether you are using a neutral or a casual tone. One of the best ways to do this is to stick with an active voice and then shorten that active voice even further.
For example, rather than saying,
“For observability to work, it’s required to send application logs, metrics, and traces to a monitoring tool.”
You can start with,
“You must send application logs, metrics, and traces to a monitoring tool for observability.”
And then further shorten it to,
“A good monitoring tool will use application logs, metrics, and traces for observability.”
When introducing or explaining a concept, start with the “WHY”. Why do you need this? What problem does it solve? Why are modern enterprises adopting this trend? And then use real-life examples. Nothing beats it. For example,
“Unlike its previous versions, so-and-so technology works like this-and-that now. Most businesses are adopting the new method because it helps churn out more effective software code without manual testing. In the traditional Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), companies spent a lot of time and resources manually testing application code. Thanks to this new version of the technology, they can allocate those resources to further enhance the application.”
Once you have introduced or mentioned something, don’t go and explain it again down the article. Stop using “as we mentioned before” or “as you saw before”. Your readers are intelligent people, you don’t need to remind them.
Don’t use jargon – you’ll alienate readers if you’re too heavy-handed with complicated industry terms or even less-used English words (e.g., “our conjecture is…”). Similarly, avoid using unnecessary superlatives (e.g., “tremendous effect”, “fantastic solution”).
Final Words
A few years ago, even an AI robot took instructions in plain English to learn how to play a video game. It shows that humans and robots respond more positively to simple communication.
We’re proud to say we’ve built our business using this concept. We turn complex technical subjects into winning content and do this by using simplicity. Here at Professional Data Skills, every piece of content we create goes through extensive quality checks, reviews, and edits to ensure the message is succinct. Our clients love us for the quality we provide. You can check a few samples of our work here.
Get in touch with us to let us help you with your technical content needs or to learn more about winning formulas.