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Plain Language

Tansa provides custom style guides for many industries and agencies:

Health Care | Government | Finance | Legal | Nonprofit

Whether you work for a government agency, health care facility or nonprofit organization, creating content can be easy; keeping it simple can be time-consuming. 

There’s a great deal to consider when your content must adhere to Plain Language standards. Writers and editors not only have to consider the tone of their writing, but make sure they are using the simplest words to convey their message. When you’re surrounded by it, and use it on a daily basis, it can be difficult to avoid your in-house technobabble and corporate jargon.

If you work in any of the fields above, or perhaps in the financial or legal sectors, there’s a great deal of jargon and unique terminology used in these professions. Plain Language editors should avoid such terms unless their use is relevant and can be clearly understood by the reader.

Writing to a PLAIN Language standard is no small task. Constructing sentences that are short and to the point, maintain an active voice and are easy to understand takes training and skill. Read more about the Plain Language Association International (PLAIN).

Given the often complex nature of their content, a number of industries have standardized their written communication on Plain Language. The US government and many countries around the world have mandated that all published content should adhere to this writing standard.

Plain Language module

Tansa’s Plain Language module can flag jargon, terminology and verbose sentences to help ensure clear, concise and effective communication.

 

Our carefully researched and editor-vetted dictionaries have been customized with entries that streamline and improve writing based on Plain Language Guidelines. Designed to edit content quickly and clearly, Tansa’s PLAIN guidance can simplify complex concepts, reduce jargon and produce more effective copy by offering suggestions for terms, usage, synonyms and sentence structure.


This guide will help you turn cloudy, complicated content into clean, clear copy by identifying inconsistency and repetition.

 

Tansa can identify and correct:

  • Style
  • Word usage
  • Jargon
  • Terminology
  • Abbreviations
  • Consistency

Customization

A major consideration when creating plain language content is knowing, understanding and catering to one’s audience. Tansa’s custom style guides help editors adapt their content to their specific audience. 

Readability

If clarity, conciseness and consistency isn’t enough, Tansa will even grade the readability of your content and provide statistical data on the complexity of your writing. Tansa can identify the number of characters, the length of words, sentences and syllables in words to ensure Plain guidelines are achieved.

Tansa’s readability scoring is based on a half-dozen indexes, including Flesch-Kincaid, Dale-Chall and SMOG.

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