Plain English for Customers Who Learned It Second

Who is reading the page

In Metro Vancouver and many other BC communities, plenty of your customers grew up speaking another language, and many of them read English every day at work.

Most of them do not need a translated website. They read plain English well. What slows them down is everything that is not plain: idioms, trade jargon, and sentences that run to forty words.

A reader who meets "ballpark figure" or "no strings attached" has two choices. Look it up, or guess. Both take effort, and an easier page from a competitor is a tap away.

The fix is not simpler ideas. It is the same ideas, written so they can be read once.

What slows a second-language reader

• Idioms, such as on the house, ballpark figure or a no-brainer.
• Phrasal verbs like drop off, set up or put off, each with several meanings.
• Trade jargon that staff use every day and customers never do.
• Long sentences that carry three ideas and a condition at the end.
• Several names for the same service on different pages.
• Dates written as numbers, which read differently depending on where you grew up.

The fifth is the one nobody notices from inside the business. A reader who meets two names on two pages reasonably assumes two different services, then books the wrong one or phones to ask.

Idioms are invisible to the people who use them

A trade term at least looks like a term. A reader knows to look it up, and a dictionary will have it.

An idiom looks like ordinary words. "We will never leave you high and dry" uses words any learner knows, arranged to mean something none of them mean.

Translation makes it worse. Chrome offers to translate any page that is not in the browser's own language, and an idiom translated word by word can come out as nonsense.

Writers rarely spot their own idioms, because to a native speaker they are simply how things are said. Someone else has to find them.

Short sentences, one idea each

Aim for sentences a reader can hold in mind at once: one idea, around fifteen to twenty words, with the subject near the start.

Long sentences are hardest when the important part comes last. "If you are unable to attend and have not given us two days' notice, a fee will apply" hides the rule behind two conditions.

Split it and lead with the instruction: "Please give us two days' notice if you cannot come. Without notice, there is a fee."

Common words and one name for each thing

Choose the everyday word where one exists: use rather than utilise, start rather than commence, help rather than facilitate.

Keep a trade term the customer will hear on the phone or see on an invoice, and say what it means the first time it appears.

The same goes for your own names. Decide what each service is called and use that name in the menu, on the service page, in the price list and on the booking form.

School teaches writers to vary their words to avoid repetition. On a service page, repetition is a kindness.

A worked example

A medical spa in a suburban shopping centre offered injections, chemical peels, laser hair removal and a range of facials. Its site had been written by a copywriter who liked a lively phrase.

The peel page promised to "turn back the clock" with "zero downtime", and called one treatment a lunchtime peel. The injection treatment had four different names across four pages.

Many of the spa's clients read English as a second language. They asked the front desk whether downtime meant closing hours, whether the lunchtime peel was offered only at noon, and which of the four names to book.

Each idiom and each extra name was a small puzzle, and each puzzle became a phone call or a client who went somewhere easier.

The rewrite gave every treatment one name, used everywhere. Idioms became plain statements: "Most people go back to work the same day." Aftercare became five numbered steps, with times written as numerals.

Dates, times and prices that cannot be misread

A date written 08/10/2017 is August 10 to one reader and October 8 to another. Write the month as a word: August 10, 2017.

Write times one way across the whole site, such as 9:30 am, and avoid forms like half nine, which a German or Dutch speaker may read as half past eight.

For prices, say what is included and what costs extra. "From $99" with the conditions in small print is a puzzle in any language.

Plain does not mean childish

Some owners worry that plain English will make the business sound basic. It does not have to. The ideas stay exactly as precise; only the sentences change.

Native speakers benefit as much as anyone. Someone reading on a phone in a parking lot, one thumb on the screen, reads like a second-language reader: quickly, partly, looking for one fact.

How to test a page

Read it aloud. Wherever you stumble or run out of breath, the sentence is too long or in the wrong order.

Ask someone who learned English as an adult to read one service page and tell you, in their own words, what you offer and what it costs. Where they hesitate is where the page needs work.

Word can show readability statistics after a spelling check if the option is switched on. Treat the grade level as a rough signal, not a target.

The counter-case

Some pages need precise technical language. A supplier selling to other trades, or a clinic describing a procedure, should keep the exact term and explain it once rather than swap it for something vague.

Plain English also does not replace a translated page where a large group of your customers prefers another language. There, a few key pages written by a person in that language may matter more.

And a playful brand voice can survive in headlines and photographs. It just should not carry the facts.

For the pages that explain services, prices and instructions: short sentences, common words, and one name for each thing.

Three pages first

1. Pick your three busiest pages in Analytics.
2. Read each one aloud and mark the stumbles.
3. Circle every idiom and replace it.
4. Choose one name for each service, everywhere.
5. Split sentences longer than twenty-five words.
6. Write dates and times one way only.
7. Ask a second-language reader to explain a page back.

Step four reaches beyond any single page. A service page rewritten perfectly still confuses readers if the menu and the booking form call the service something else.

The same customers, writing back to you, are the subject of reviews written in another language.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.