This article explains how, but it doesn’t explain why: you should do this because it’s an accessibility issue. NHS Digital came up with a good example of this problem: https://digital.nhs.uk/blog/transformation-blog/2019/pee-and...
1. Most people writing content will assume that their readers are like themselves or their social circle and will therefore have good literacy skills. However the actual proportion of people with poor (or even just not high) literacy skills is much higher than you might estimate from your social circle.
2. Improving clarity for people with poor literacy will also improve readability for people with good literacy.
(I'm not sure if I'm agreeing with you here)
Essentially, yes.
Using words most people are familiar with will afford a lot of people nearly instantaneous cognition [0] of the information you are trying to convey with your writing.
This applies to both ends of the reading spectrum: highly educated people who do a lot of reading than most; and poorly educated people who probably had to drop out of school to make ends meet.
> Research shows that higher literacy people prefer plain English because it allows them to understand the information as quickly as possible.
> For example, research into use of specialist legal language in legal documents found:
> 80% of people preferred sentences written in clear English - and the more complex the issue, the greater that preference (for example, 97% preferred ‘among other things’ over the Latin ‘inter alia’)
> the more educated the person and the more specialist their knowledge, the greater their preference for plain English
> People understand complex specialist language, but do not want to read it if there’s an alternative. This is because people with the highest literacy levels and the greatest expertise tend to have the most to read. They do not have time to pore through reams of dry, complicated prose.
someone linked this above: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/content-design/writing-for-gov-u...
My takeaway is slightly different: simple words (familiar) are easier to digest than big words (unfamiliar) because familiar words will be parsed very quickly for most people than unfamiliar words.
I prefer to use the categorization of “familiar” vs “unfamiliar” because the categorization of a word as “big” or “simple” depends largely on the reading ability of the person making the assessment.
This can be a real issue, indeed.
It is one thing to speak to people in a language they will understand without judging. But it is another thing to simplify grammar and vocabulary too much in written technical documents that need to be precise.
One example is the push to use "plain English" in legal documents. As it happens, legal documents are highly technical and the wording is very important, with terms having an actual precise meaning.
There needs to be a balance.