Writing for the person who will read it

Register is a constraint, not a costume

Earlier you learned that a role does less than people think. The exception, and it is a large one, is naming the reader. That is not dressing the model up; it is information about what a correct output is.

Explain this to the plumber who has to install it, not the architect who designed it.

This is for a school governor who is not a lawyer and has ten minutes.

The reader is my father-in-law, who is 74, does not use email, and is worried about being scammed.

Each of those changes the vocabulary, the length, the assumed knowledge, the amount of reassurance and the order of information. None of them is a personality for the model to wear.

The four things a reader description should carry

What they already know. The single highest-value fact. “She knows the project but not the technology.” “He has never used a spreadsheet.” “They know the regulation exists; they do not know it applies to them.”

What they will do with it. Approve a budget. Decide whether to call a lawyer. Follow the steps tonight without you there. Forward it to somebody more senior.

How much time they have. Ten minutes, or thirty seconds on a phone between meetings. This drives structure more than any style instruction.

What they are feeling. Not sentimentality: it is a real constraint. Somebody who has already complained twice needs a different first sentence from somebody making a routine enquiry. Somebody frightened needs the reassurance before the detail.

Reading level, stated properly

“Simple English” is vague and often produces something patronising. Be mechanical:

Short sentences, mostly under 15 words. Everyday words. Explain any term that is not everyday, in the same sentence, in brackets. No metaphors. British spelling.

Or anchor it: “aim for the level of a good newspaper’s news pages, not its comment pages.”

Avoid asking for a specific reading-grade score. Models are unreliable at hitting one and the number implies a precision the output does not have.

Plain language is not less respectful

Worth saying, because people resist it. Writing plainly for a reader who is not a specialist is not talking down. Talking down is explaining what they already know, or adding “don’t worry, it’s simple”. Plain language removes the barrier; condescension adds a different one.

If you are unsure, add: “Do not simplify the facts. Simplify the sentences.”

Matching the reader’s own words

If you have something the reader wrote (their email, their question, their brief) paste it. It carries their vocabulary, their formality, and often the specific thing they are actually worried about, which is frequently not what they asked.

This is the cheapest register instruction available and almost nobody uses it. One pasted email beats a paragraph of description of the person who wrote it.

When the reader is a group

Most real documents have several readers with different needs: the manager who will decide, the specialist who will check, the assistant who will file it. Say so, and give the structure that serves them:

Two audiences. First half for a director who will decide in two minutes and knows nothing technical. Second half for the engineer who will check my figures. Mark the boundary with a heading.

That is a better instruction than any compromise register, because it stops the model averaging two readers into one who does not exist.

The check before sending

Read it as the person named, not as yourself. The specific question: what would they have to look up?

Every term they would search for is either a term to replace or a term to explain in brackets. That one pass catches most of what makes a document fail with its reader, and it takes thirty seconds.

The mistake underneath most bad writing at work

People write for the person they wish they were addressing: somebody with the same context, the same vocabulary, and the same twenty minutes they just spent thinking about it.

The model will happily do the same, because you described the topic and not the reader. Naming the reader is not a refinement you add at the end when the writing matters. It is one of the six slots, and leaving it empty produces the single most common defect in workplace documents: technically accurate prose that its intended reader cannot act on.