Wikipedia:Plain English

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This is an essay. It is not a policy or guideline. Please update the page as needed, or discuss it on the talk page.

Wikipedia articles ought to be written in plain English.

The art of writing plain English must be acquired. Strunk and White's The Elements of Style is a justly famous instruction manual that tries to teach it. Now, the rules of Strunk and White are not applicable in every situation; Swinburne or Jeremy Taylor rewritten to comply with their guidelines would lose all interest.

But an encyclopedia article is a piece of expository prose. Its purpose is not to impress its readers with your learning or lexicon, even if that is the reason why you write here. One of its chief purposes, instead, is to introduce new knowledge to people innocent of it; another is to remind readers of what they had half forgotten. For these purposes, plain words work best.

As Strunk put it:

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

Use all the words you need, but no more. George Orwell took a passage from the Book of Ecclesiastes:

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

and recast it as:

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must inevitably be taken into account.

but his edited version was not an improvement.

Vagueness and inappropriate abstraction do NOT help achieve a neutral point of view. Someone might argue that Orwell's "after" version is better because it is more impersonal; this logic is false. The path to achieving NPOV is likelier to be found in the opposite direction. To call someone a terrorist is a value judgment; tell us instead that they bombed the subway and that their compatriots issued a statement containing political demands, and you are as close to neutrality as mere mortals have the power to achieve. Concrete words are inherently less pointed than any labels, and the truer path to neutrality is to replace the abstract with the concrete.

[edit] Particular problems

[edit] Jargon and technical vocabulary

See also: Wikipedia:Explain jargon

Jargon and technical vocabulary are inevitable in many fields. You still should explain them briefly, or at least give your readers a Wikilink to help them understand it, whenever it occurs.

If you aren't a lawyer, a jargon word like estoppel may throw you. Estoppel is actually a fairly easy notion to grasp; while it has been complicated past justification by the scholastic method of the law, it basically means that "the law is not amused when you contradict yourself, whether by words or actions, after someone has acted on what you said before."

Jargon and lack of context a particular problem in mathematical articles. We have many such articles, and some could use help. The difficulty here comes from framing them for the right audience. The professional mathematician may find a Wikipedia article on such a subject hasty and sketchy, while lay readers may find them baffling. Information presented from the viewpoint of the sociology of science goes a long way towards making these articles interesting and intelligible to those of us who aren't mathematicians.

More context is valuable in these situations. Tell us something about the history of the problem the theorem was meant to solve. Tell us about any practical applications of the theorem. This sort of information allows the non-mathematician to take home something from the mathematical article.

[edit] Business writing

• See also Template talk:Buzzword

Inappropriate vagueness and abstractions, especially the vogue words commonly described as buzzwords, are a frequent problem in business writing.

You would think that business people, stereotypically pragmatic and living in a real world of "shoes and ships and sealing-wax," would be ideal authors: practical people concerned with profit and loss do not mince words. Too often, this is not the case. I suspect that business people are tainted by the first management fad paperback they browse through: this is where the buzzwords come from. The paperback writers don't know anything about your business, so they rabbit on vaguely about Process and System and Value Added and Customer Response.

I frequent Articles for Deletion, where articles about various businesses make for some of the hardest decisions. I am an inclusionist who hates spam, so I suffer from some cognitive dissonance when these articles appear. Many businesses are in fact notable and worthy of encyclopedic articles. And, though other editors rightly fear that they are vanity articles if someone within the company starts the article, this difficulty is not insurmountable for a truly notable business: you probably know more about it than most, and are more motivated than others to tell us about it. Given these potentially conflicting policies and conflicting guidelines, the clarity of your prose is likely to win or lose my vote to keep your article.

"Listen to the chair leg of Truth! IT DOES NOT LIE!" If your hope is to suborn Wikipedia to improve your Google search rankings, I don't much care if that was your objective in writing a vanity article about your business. Make a good enough case within the business notability guidelines, and I don't care if you are using Wikipedia to get some free publicity. I'd do the same thing if I were in your shoes: it's perfectly understandable behaviour. But for the love of God, write plain English when you do! Twaddle like this:

Ajax™ Waste Solutions, Inc. is a dynamic, market-driven firm that offers value-added human waste management solutions to growing sectors in the economy. . . .

rouses choking fury in me. The slightest whiff of this style and I will read no further. But if you instead had written:

Ajax Waste Solutions, Inc. is a corporation that manufactures toilets and other bathroom and plumbing fixtures for public and institutional use, and sells them wholesale to building contractors. . . .

I am inclined to smile. Now I know what Ajax Waste Solutions makes, and I'd even forgive you for including "Solutions" in your company name. We can look the other way if your true purpose was to boost your ranking on search engines. You've done yourself a bigger favour this way also. Your potential customers aren't going to be searching for "human waste management solutions". They will be searching for "toilets."

If your business has a product, tell us what it is. If your business provides a service, describe it concretely. And if you can't find the words anymore to describe your business without telling us about how dynamic and market-driven it is, let someone in engineering write the article.