From the course: Learning to Write for the Web
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Formal text is harder to read
From the course: Learning to Write for the Web
Formal text is harder to read
- Formal text is hard to read. It turns people off. If you use words that people don't use in everyday conversation, your readers have to work harder to understand what you're trying to say. Some readers won't bother to do this work, or they might get scared away by what they consider to be legal terminology, so they'll miss your message. There are two things you can do to make your text seem less formal, without resorting to colloquial expressions. The first is to write as if you were speaking directly to your audience, and the second is to write in the active, rather than the passive voice. It's easy to write as if you were speaking. In fact, I find it harder to make my writing more formal than I do to write in a conversational tone. So, why do people write in a stilted formal manner? Maybe they want to be taken more seriously, and they think that using legalese or jargon will help with that. Maybe they're embarrassed about the message they have to get across, so they want to hide…
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