Plain English is a safety feature

When an instruction can be read two ways, someone eventually reads it the wrong way. In work where the stakes are high, clear writing is not a nicety. It is a control, as real as a guard rail.

George Orwell got to the heart of it in 1946, in an essay about political language. His advice was simple: say what you mean, in the plainest words that will carry it, and cut anything that does not earn its place. He was writing about the fog that hides bad ideas, but the same rules fit a method statement, a policy wording or a permit to work. Clear prose is honest prose. Murky prose hides things, sometimes including the one detail that matters.

A missing comma, five million dollars

Ambiguity is not free. In 2017 a court in the United States had to rule on an overtime dispute that turned entirely on a missing comma in a list. The wording was genuinely unclear about which activities were exempt from overtime pay, and because it could be read two ways, the drivers who brought the case won. The dairy settled the following year for five million dollars. A single punctuation mark, left out to save space, decided the meaning and the money.

That case was about pay, not safety, but it makes the point with unusual clarity. If a sentence can be read two ways, sooner or later it will be, and at the worst possible moment. Now imagine the sentence is an instruction for isolating a machine, or the dosage on a label, or the step that says when it is safe to enter.

The reader of a safety instruction is often tired, rushed, and standing somewhere noisy. They should not also have to interpret. Their job is to act.

How to write so it cannot be misread

The craft is not complicated, which is part of its charm.

• Short sentences. One idea each. A long sentence is somewhere for ambiguity to hide.
• Active voice. Say who does what. “Isolate the supply” beats “the supply should be isolated”, which leaves open by whom.
• One instruction per line. If a step contains an “and”, check whether it is really two steps.
• Name the thing. Not “the unit” if there are three units. The exact one.
• Avoid words with two meanings. Safety standards moved away from “inflammable” precisely because people read it as the opposite of what it means.

Plain language is a form of care. It tells the reader you respected them enough to be clear. And in safety-critical work that care is also a control, quietly preventing the misreading before it can happen. The clearest writer in the room is often, without anyone noticing, the safest person in the building.

References

1. George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (1946). orwellfoundation.com.
2. O’Connor v. Oakhurst Dairy, US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, 2017; settled 2018. Reported by the New York Times, “Lack of Oxford Comma Could Cost Maine Company Millions”. nytimes.com.

Written and published by Logincident.