I presented this paper at the 2023 conference for the Institute of Professional Editors (IPEd). The theme of the conference was "Futureproofing the editing profession".
The paper speaks to professional editors but includes tips that writers can use to boost their writing.
It has been amended slightly for publication on the Goldfinch site.
This paper journeys through the 9 lives of one plain English editor. It presents a very personal evolution in the plain language field, working with business and government writers. Yet many of these lives – or characters – apply to editors across the profession.
If you have been editing for years, you will see familiar faces in the line-up, especially if your expertise lies in developmental or substantive work. If you are a newer editor, you may learn some strategies to set you on the path to editing alchemy.
Together we will look at the strengths of each life and what they bring to the editing process. We will also consider some challenges they face in a future framed by AI writing tools and digital distribution, where content creation is more egalitarian than ever before. Despite these challenges, by the ninth life, we will have made a clear case for the value of plain English editing – and editors at large.
So we come to our cast of characters. In this paper, you will meet:
Before we delve any further, let’s quickly consider what plain language is. According to the International Plain Language Federation (n.d.):
A communication is in plain language if its wording, structure and design are so clear that the intended readers can easily find what they need, understand what they find and use that information.
We will return to these themes several times during the paper.
The opening quartet
We open with a quartet of lives most interested in accuracy and consistency at the sentence level. They represent the more mechanical aspects of editing practice:
1. The perfectionist
2. The gatekeeper
3. The observer
4. The gardener.
Life 1 – the perfectionist
The perfectionist’s strengths and challenges
Perfectionism is a trait often associated with editors and this character is one that prompts many to take up the role in the first place. In a recent survey of 118 professional editors, 66% said they would describe themselves as “a perfectionist in [their] work life”. Another 26% said they might do or they have learned to let go of their perfectionist tendencies (Dixon Cooper 2023).
The great value of the perfectionist is their ability to spot errors, which some might argue is the editor’s main reason for being. Their eagle eyes catch the typos, extra spaces, wayward punctuation and misused words that others do not always notice: “global warning potential” or “teaming rain”.
The problem with perfectionism is that perfection is nigh on impossible. Constantly expecting it of yourself can lead to extra effort and tightening deadlines as you check and re-check your work. It can also lead to guilt or anxiety when the inevitable happens and an error sneaks through to publication. Long term, the effects on your productivity and mental health can leave you feeling burnt out.
Strategies for the perfectionist
So how do you harness the benefits of the perfectionist without falling prey to their trickier side?
Follow a repeatable process | Map out the steps you will take on each project, from setting up a style sheet to managing quality control. Allocate and monitor your time. |
Be upfront with clients about errors | If you can, note in your contract that you always aim to deliver work of the highest quality, but you cannot promise it will be completely free from errors. |
Use technology to support you | Test out the different tools available for editors, from MS Word’s Read Aloud function to PerfectIt or Editor’s Toolkit Plus to macros. Even ChatGPT may have its uses (Bracey 2023). Realise the limits of these tools, of course, but let them take some of the pressure off you. |
Manage your mental health | If you're the type to get stuck in compulsive checking, look after your mental health, such as with professional support or mindfulness exercises. |
Beyond these techniques, we are often told it is best if we can own and learn from our mistakes.
Try to remember this monk fixing a scribal error in a book of hours (c 1300). He is climbing up the manuscript’s left margin – plain as day – to point to where the corrected line at the bottom should slot in.
Thankfully, it is unlikely that any error you leave behind in your work will ever need such visible atonement.
Life 2 – the gatekeeper
The gatekeeper’s strengths and challenges
The next character is the perfectionist’s best friend. As you strive for perfection, you need to define what that is. You look for absolutes – rights and wrongs – and the immutable rules for writing and editing. The gatekeeper is the one to uphold those rules.
If you value language – which all editors surely do – rules appear to be essential. An accepted dictionary and style guide are indispensable tools to ensure both consistency and accuracy. And the gatekeeper wields them to protect the language’s integrity, which is constantly under siege from social media trends and business buzzwords.
Yet following rules and gatekeeping without question is a risky game for an editor, especially an inexperienced one. You can easily take prescriptivism to the extreme and bat away changing usage to the detriment of writers and readers alike. Consider, for instance, a tiny modal verb like “may”. For an editor coming of age in the world of international standards, as this one did, “may” is all about permission: “The spigot may be brass, copper or stainless steel.” But in common use, it is often interchangeable with “can” or “might”, which relate to ability or possibility. Would you enforce a distinction?
As editors, we walk a fine line between defending the integrity of our language and placing it under glass as though it is part of a museum display. Peter Sokolowski (2013) from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary has pointed out that “most English speakers accept that the language changes over time”. We know our English is not the same as Shakespeare’s. But, he adds, what we do not necessarily accept are changes made in our own time. The debate over the singular “they” is one example from recent years, and our Canadian colleague Gael Spivak (2017) has collected more than 100 articles on the topic.
Leaving aside usage, gatekeeping can also affect an editor’s appreciation of nuance and their ability to weigh up editorial decisions when there is no clear right or wrong. Worse still, it can mean the gate is firmly shut on readers when their preferences and access needs are ignored in favour of a “rule”.
Strategies for the gatekeeper
When you think about futureproofing the profession, you can see the potential issues created by a gatekeeping attitude. If you are too rigid to adapt, you may well be replaced by an algorithm that can! With experience, though, you can learn to manage these tensions.
Love your dictionary and style guide | Remember that the dictionary and style guide are still indispensable tools, but they capture conventions – not just hard and fast rules. |
Prioritise consistency over "correctness" | Focus on bringing consistency and clarity to the text, elements that are important across genres. |
Match the text to the audience's needs | Centre the audience in your editorial choices. This is the fundamental principle of plain language: it underpins everything else. Is the writer’s audience made up of subject matter experts, such as nurses or lawyers or tower crane operators? Is the audience more general and public? Does it include the 44% of Australians or New Zealanders with low literacy (OECD 2019), who face barriers in their everyday lives because content is needlessly complex? |
If you are ever unsure which way to turn with a specific stylistic problem, call on the wisdom of poet Mary Oliver (2012):
Make an editorial decision you would feel comfortable explaining, record it on your style sheet … and keep on dancing.
Life 3 – the observer
The observer’s strengths and challenges
The observer is the gatekeeper relaxed and reimagined – with the metaphorical gate now chocked open. This character watches what passes through, in both directions.
Keen observation is an important skill for an editor. Unsurprisingly, it is often linked with another trait that defines our profession: introversion. Of the 118 editors recently surveyed, an impressive 82% said they are either “somewhat introverted” or “highly introverted” (Dixon Cooper 2023).
Introverts tend to watch, synthesise information and search for meaning. So the observer sticks to the sidelines, but still plays an active role in noticing:
the words that are coming into everyday usage or taking on a new usage (“e-change”, “unicorn” [of a company], “rainbow washing”, “black cladding”, “gaslit”, “quiet quit” and so on)
the impact of new reading habits, technologies and platforms.
This can require concentration as the goalposts are regularly on the move. Words can fall out of favour very quickly, from overuse or because they cause harm. Words can also be reclaimed and given a fresh start. We will come back to this idea with our eighth life: the advocate.
As for new habits and technologies, Jakob Nielsen (1997) told us years ago that around 80% of readers scan web pages. That has obvious implications for sentences and paragraphs (make them short!) and for headings (make them regular!) in digital content. But more recent research (Liu 2012) suggests scanning habits have shifted to printed material too.
And what is the latest advice on italics, single quote marks and hyperlinks for readers using assistive technologies?
Strategies for the observer
The more you engage with these ongoing discussions, the better placed you will be to learn and respond to change. Then you can really be sure you are helping your writers to meet their readers’ needs. And in turn, that will help you futureproof your own practice.
Find your community | Seek out other editors and language lovers. Join the Plain Language Association International (PLAIN) or Clarity, the association for plain legal language. Connect in online forums, such as Secret Editors’ Business, Conscious Language + Design or Editors’ Backroom on Facebook. |
Read whatever you can | Bookmark the Conscious style guide (Yin n.d.) online. Study the fantastic new accessibility guide, Books without barriers (Ganner et al. 2023). Get the latest journal from PLAIN or Clarity. Sign up for e-news from the major dictionaries around the world. |
To learn more about introversion and the great value of the quiet observer, you can also read Quiet: the power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking (Cain 2012).
And don’t be too perturbed by this observation attributed to Andy Warhol (source unknown): “I’m afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.”
It serves as a good reminder that sometimes you must take all that looking and leap into action.
Life 4 – the gardener
The gardener’s strengths and challenges
The gardener is the character to do just that, by “getting into the weeds” of editing.
Their focus is plain English wording – the straightforward sentences that convey meaning. In the garden of traditional business writing, weeds run riot and they tend to obscure the content.
They sprout as:
passive verbs that hide agency and accountability: “mistakes were made”
nominalisations where the action is at one remove: “assistance was rendered to the patient”
pesky little phrases that serve no useful purpose: “in relation to”, “prior to”, “for the purposes of” and so on
sentences that twist and turn through several ideas, or just go round in circles:
It is agreed that the contractor, subject to the conditions of contract, will for the contract price or an amended sum determined under the contract, as appropriate, perform and complete the work required to be done under the contract.
Simple wording is not the be-all and end-all of plain language, of course. Many practitioners are quite uneasy with the way our field has been co-opted to mean shortening words and sentences at will. You might even say it has strains of gatekeeping. After all, one person’s jargon is another person’s industry vocabulary. Language that comes across as warm and approachable in one forum may be considered unprofessional in another.
So once again, we return to what is most suitable for the audience, particularly when it comes to technical terms and the level of formality. And bringing this judgement to bear is what will set you apart from the language apps nipping at your heels, such as Grammarly and Hemingway.
That is not to say that simplified wording is without value. It has great value. No matter how literate the readers are, or how familiar they are with the subject matter, nobody really needs phrases like “in relation to” when they can have a single word like “about”. Nobody will suffer if you break a convoluted 52-word sentence into smaller parts. But someone probably will suffer if you do not.
Let’s return to the audience of lawyers from earlier. Back in 1987, Joseph Kimble (2012) surveyed judges and lawyers in the United States. He asked them to consider six paragraphs, each with two versions – one in a traditional legal style and one in plain language. Almost 1,500 legal experts responded, and they preferred the plain versions by margins of 80–86%.
Strategies for the gardener
Thirty-odd years later, you can still help readers with interventions at the sentence level:
Turn most verbs into active ones | Activate verbs where the writer needs to be clear about who is doing what: “my government made mistakes”; “the paramedic resuscitated the patient”. |
Mow down fluff and needless repetition | Don’t let a writer use multiple words when one will do the same job: “prior to” becomes “before” and “for the purposes of” becomes “for”. |
Focus on one idea or action in each sentence | Break up longwinded sentences or drill down to the main point: "The contractor will do the agreed work for the agreed price in line with this contract." But do keep an ear listening to the rhythm. |
Remember that even the most experienced readers will benefit from brevity. Make sure they are not left to languish in the weeds.
An interlude
Life 5 – the impostor
This is the character who might turn up – with luck, only occasionally – to give you some terrible news. You are no good at your job. You are a fraud and someone is going to find you out.
We will not linger too long with the impostor because they are born of and support entrenched systems that thrive on the imbalance of power.
But waxing and waning confidence can be a professional headache for many of us. In fact, only 14% of our surveyed editors said they never feel like an impostor (Dixon Cooper 2023).
The one benefit of so-called impostor syndrome is that it keeps you alert. It reminds you to pay attention and to keep learning and upgrading your skills.
Interrogate the fear | Ask yourself why you feel this way. Is your inner perfectionist holding court? Is the gatekeeper stymieing your decision-making? Has a particular engagement knocked your confidence? |
Take stock of your experience | Think about your skills, knowledge, experience and qualifications (which can go far beyond traditional degrees from sandstone universities). |
Book in some PD | Sign up for professional development. This might be an hour-long IPEd session or a full-day workshop from a plain English provider. |
If nothing else, try to cut yourself some slack. Editing is tougher than it may look from the outside, and sometimes you just have to laugh:
The closing quartet
Our final four lives are more mercurial. They are interested in clarity, access and equity:
6. The architect
7. The designer
8. The advocate
9. The alchemist.
Life 6 – the architect
Content warning: this section ends with some explicit language.
The architect’s strengths and challenges
What the gardener is to plain English wording, the architect is to structure. The skilled architect designs a space that people can access, make their way through and use to complete a task.
The space may be the 10-storey monolith of a government website or the two-bedroom bungalow of a health and safety procedure. It might just be the single room of a fact sheet. No matter its size or shape, it has to give readers the information they need quickly and easily. In the words of the architect and artist El Lissitzky (Drutt 1999:14), “The room is there for the human being – not the human being for the room.”
What a business or government audience does not want is a labyrinthine maze. The following headings are based on a report about a school’s facilities:
BACKGROUND Impetus for review Review committee METHODOLOGY Objective Scope STATISTICAL ANALYSIS CONSULTATION PROTOCOLS CONSULTATION WITH P&C INFORMATION AVAILABLE BARRIERS CHALLENGES | Security FINANCIAL CHALLENGES SCHOOL FACILITIES Parking Classrooms K–3 Classrooms 4–6 Office and administration areas School hall Staffroom Toilet areas Main entrance Drop-off zones (Kiss and ride) | Signage Classrooms – demountables External access routes DOORWAYS STAIRS SPORTING FACILITIES Play areas Play equipment Sports fields Amphitheatre and COLA CONCLUSIONS RECOMMENDATIONS |
The structure might not look too complicated, until you consider that the report has two more heading levels below these ones. And when you look for a summary that will guide you through the content, you are left wanting. What’s more, you see that the background is given pride of place, while the all-important recommendations are hidden at the end. The writers could not resist the universal urge to tell the story of their process, rather than focusing on their readers’ priorities: the outcomes of that process.
We will see how you might improve this report’s structure after we have looked at some general strategies you can use.
Strategies for the architect
A complex text calls on you to put serious thought into the architecture and retrofit structural changes when you can see the writer has left the audience behind.
Put the main message up the front | Identify the content that readers most want or need to know. This means understanding the goals they are trying to achieve – from acting on a recommendation to claiming a rebate. Once you have the main message, do not keep readers in suspense. |
Add short summaries in key places | Remind readers where they are in the text by starting chapters or major sections with summaries. These might be as simple as a list of key points. |
Group related information | Draw information together into uniform blocks of content that readers can move through smoothly and logically. |
Turn headings into navigation devices | Use headings as signposts. Make them helpful, giving more information as you move down the hierarchy. Check they are tagged for accessibility. Think about whether numbering would add value. |
Our report on school facilities is much easier to get to grips with when the structure is streamlined:
1 Summary 1.1 Our review 1.2 Findings 1.3 Conclusions 1.4 Recommendations 2 Challenges facing the school 2.1 Enrolment numbers 2.2 Funding 2.3 Accessibility 2.4 Security | 3 School access 3.1 Parking and drop-off zones 3.2 Entrances 3.3 Stairs and paths 3.4 Signs 4 Core teaching and admin areas 4.1 Permanent classrooms 4.2 Demountable classrooms 4.3 Office and admin block 4.4 School hall | 5 Other facilities 5.1 Play areas 5.2 Sports fields 5.3 Amphitheatre and outdoor learning 5.4 Toilets 6 Context 6.1 Review committee 6.2 Methods 6.3 Consultation |
Looking at headings from another angle, Munanjahli and South Sea Islander scholar Chelsea Watego (2021) smashes conventions in the last chapter of Another day in the colony. Its success lies in the fact that it never loses sight of its message for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, Watego’s core audience.
Chapter 6 is titled “fuck hope”. And every single one of its 7 subheadings is the same: fuck hope, fuck hope, fuck hope ... The message could not be clearer as the refrain builds to the final, powerful call to action:
fuck hope. be sovereign.
Life 7 – the designer
The designer’s strengths and challenges
The designer works alongside the architect in displaying the content to maximum effect. This is not to say that all plain English editors need to be graphic designers. But being aware of typography, spacing and other design elements adds another string to your bow in the search for professional futureproofing. Even just applying consistent styles in a Word file can be valuable for clients.
As Ellen Lupton (2010:87) notes, “Designers provide ways into – and out of – the flood of words.” This flood should have already been mitigated by the gardener and the architect, so the designer’s task of supporting usability is made easier.
However, it is vital you remember that different readers will rely on the design in different ways. A PDF with complex visuals may look impressive, but its design fails as soon as a screen reader cannot decipher it. Similarly, a pretty cursive typeface, such as the popular “Better Times”, may make it hard for sighted readers to scan the architect’s immaculately crafted headings.
Strategies for the designer
A plain language design will be on the simpler side, but it is unwise to mistake “plain” for “dull” or even “ugly”. It can be filled with colour and life – as long as each element supports the audience.
Set a clear visual hierarchy | Clearly distinguish between each heading level and your paragraph style. Use font sizing, colour and borders for different effects that will make the hierarchy stand out. |
Give the content space to breathe | Lupton (2010:91) says that design is “as much an act of spacing as an act of marking”. Tweak the margins, paragraph spacing, indents and leading until you have balanced the weight of the text with the emptiness of the background. (And try to add space before a paragraph style, rather than after it.) |
Choose graphics that back up the text | Use tables, icons, charts and other graphics if they help the writer convey their content. But make them accessible, with simple formatting, clear labels, image descriptions and the like (see Ganner et al. 2023). |
If you are ever in doubt, textile designer William Morris (1880) had some very sound advice:
If you want a golden rule that will fit everything, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.
Life 8 – the advocate
Content warning: this section discusses harmful language, including racist and ableist terms.
The advocate’s strengths and challenges
The advocate takes the skills of the observer – the watching and learning – and levels up by sharing this knowledge. Advocacy can take many forms, from flagging potentially harmful words in your daily practice to campaigning for regulatory change in the longer term.
Minimising harm to readers through inclusive or conscious language is perhaps the clearest opportunity for the advocate. In fact, you might say it is an editor’s ethical duty to make sure writers use language with care. Karen Yin (n.d.) talks about considering contrasting perspectives and “peeling back the layers” to make educated choices.
You also need to be aware of the “cycle of euphemism” (Henderson Taylor 1974), now often called the “euphemism treadmill”. This is where euphemistic terms relating to race, disability and similar cultural concepts become pejorative and are replaced by different euphemisms, again and again.
More broadly, plain language practitioners around the world are campaigning for regulatory change. The US Plain Writing Act of 2010 has forced federal agencies to reconsider their communication with public readers. According to the Center for Plain Language’s yearly report cards, the Act has led to “a significant improvement” (Catania 2020). In Aotearoa New Zealand, the new Plain Language Act came into effect last month. Meanwhile, ISO 24495-1 is due in June 2023 as an international standard. All these developments suggest a bright future for readers, and for plain language editors.
Advocates also promote the rights of people with low literacy and low digital inclusion. While content creation is more egalitarian in the digital age – on platforms ranging from blogs to TikTok – it is still not open to everyone. Nor is content consumption. If you are privileged enough to have a laptop and stable internet access, it is easy to forget that 28% of Australians are “excluded” or “highly excluded” from digital life (Thomas et al. 2021). Around 20% of New Zealanders do not have the “motivation, access, skills or trust” to be digitally included (Department of Internal Affairs 2020).
Strategies for the advocate
Even if you are not fighting at the front lines, you can be an advocate in your everyday editing.
Call for equitable access | Prompt clients to create born-accessible content with different outputs, beyond the basic PDF download. Speak up if you think a text should be in easy English as well as plain English. |
Make sure you are the right fit for a project | Check you have the background and experience to take on a text that speaks to or about a specific culture or community. Will you do it justice? |
Try to use language consciously | Read about terms linked with racism, ableism, stereotypes or stigma, such as “blind review”, “nitty gritty” or “master”. Read about words being reclaimed by the communities they were once used as slurs against, such as “queer”, “fat” or “crip”. Always look closely at the issues, and think critically about language and its impacts. |
As editors, we love words. They are our life’s work, and it can be tempting to cling to some of them beyond their use-by dates. But as advocates for the text’s readers, we have to remember that those real-life people should always come before the words.
Life 9 – the alchemist
And so we meet the fabled alchemist, our ninth and final life (for now). This character brings together the skills and experiences of those who came before. They balance the many tensions this paper has discussed and achieve the ultimate editorial transformation: turning leaden text into gold.
Just as alchemists of old mixed the scientific with the philosophical, the modern-day editing alchemist applies proven plain language techniques to meet the audience’s spiritual needs:
access, inclusion and connection
clarity and usability.
And the by-product of that important work is the sought-after elixir of professional immortality. Once clients see what you can do as a plain English specialist, they will understand that Grammarly does not have all the answers and they will keep coming back to you.
The alchemist is the ultimate futureproofer.
References
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