The Oxford Guide to Plain English offers practical guidelines to help readers make their writing clearer by improving structure, word choice, grammar, punctuation, and layout. This new edition gives expert and up-to-date advice on all aspects of the writing process, from planning the material successfully to writing in the most user-friendly way.

Martin Cutts is a writer, editor, and teacher. He co-founded the Plain English Campaign in 1979, and in 1994 he founded Plain Language Commission. He gives writing-skills courses in companies, government departments, and law firms. He is a leading voice in the international plain-language movement.

• Acknowledgements


• Starting points


• The thirty guidelines


• Summary of the twelve main guidelines


• 1: Planning comes first


• 2: Organizing your material in a reader-centred structure


• 3: Writing short sentences and clear paragraphs


• 4: Preferring plain words


• 5: Writing concisely


• 6: Favouring active-voice verbs


• 7: Using vigorous verbs


• 8: Using vertical lists


• 9: Converting negative to positive


• 10: Using good punctuation


• 11: Using good grammar


• 12: Keeping errors in Czech: its time to Proof read


• 13: Dealing with some troublesome words and phrases


• 14: Using or avoiding foreign words


• 15: Undoing knotty noun strings


• 16: Reducing cross-references


• 17: Exploring and exploding some writing myths


• 18: Avoiding clichés


• 19: Pitching your writing at the right level


• 20: Writing sound starts and excellent endings


• 21: Creating better emails


• 22: Using inclusive language


• 23: Using alternatives to words alone


• 24: Caring enough about customers to write to them clearly


• 25: Overseeing colleagues' writing


• 26: Writing better instructions


• 27: Clarifying for the Web


• 28: Making legal language lucid


• 29: Writing low-literacy plain English


• 30: Clarifying page layout: some basics


• Appendix 1: Commonest words


• Appendix 2: A short history of plain-English moments


• Sources and notes


• Index