What inspired you as a linguist to get involved with plain language in financial services?

Linguistics taught me how to make words, sentences and paragraphs easier to read and understand. It’s a very solid foundation for improving customer understanding of complex documents.
But over the past twenty years, I’ve widened my scope to look not only at the communication itself, but also at how readers engage with it. In financial services, there is a power gap between readers and organisations. The organisation has lawyers, compliance teams and decades of drafting conventions. The reader has a few minutes and a decision to make about their money! Plain language is really about closing that gap. It’s about empowering the reader. So to me, the mission of plain language isn’t just to make things simpler, it’s to make things fairer. That’s what inspires me.

Plain language is often judged by how simple it sounds. Why is that a problem?

Because perceived simplicity is not the same as usability. A text can sound plain and still fail the reader.
The real measure is whether the content changes what readers understand, decide, or do. That requires proper success metrics to be defined before a project starts. It also requires realistic timelines. People have been conditioned for years to ignore financial terms and conditions because they’re dense and impenetrable. You can’t undo that pattern with just one rewrite.
We need to measure customer behaviour over the long term, and carefully analyse how we will address any problems, often through multiple communications and customer journeys.

You’ve worked on legal terms and conditions for a retail investment product. What did you actually change, and what happened?

The starting point was a standard set of legal terms: dense, visually uninviting, written for compliance rather than readers.
As part of a team of information designers and writers, I helped make them clear, inviting and accessible. That meant working on language, structure and design together.
At the start of the project, readers saw these documents as ‘small print’; over the next three years, we were able to measure a change in this perception. We saw solid progress to perceiving the documents as genuine guides to the product, answering questions such as whether it suited them, how to use it well, and what their rights were. That shift in how people related to the document was a very rewarding outcome. The business agreed when we could match the behaviour changes with increased levels of understanding and lower levels of complaints about specific issues.

How does accessibility fit into plain language work?

They’re inseparable actually.
You can write a beautifully clear document and still exclude part of your audience if you haven’t considered how people with disabilities will use it.
In financial services, this is particularly important. Financial documents affect people’s money, their rights and their decisions. Excluding anyone from understanding those documents shouldn’t be acceptable.

You use AI in your plain language work. What can it actually do, and where does it fall short?

If you’re writing a lot of similar documents, for example, product literature for a large bank, it can really help. For example, once you’ve made your plain language decisions for one product, you can use AI to roll out those same decisions at scale. That used to take weeks but now a lot of the slog work can be automated.
AI can also be used to check both human and AI writing for the most basic plain-language principles. It’s not perfect, but with careful prompting, it’s a fast first pass. No more manual checks for the passive voice!
Also, there are obvious applications for terminology management and translation.

What should an organisation do before hiring a plain language consultant?

It’s important to define what success looks like, and be honest about the timeline.
Before bringing in a consultant, gather your evidence. What are your support queries about? What complaints relate to confusion or misunderstanding? That data shapes the brief and makes the project measurable.
Behaviour change takes time. If your success measure is an increased ability to make informed decisions, you need to be prepared to measure that properly, over a time period, and not just as a one-off evaluation exercise.
Once you’ve defined your success measures, consider how you can help your teams enjoy the project – and develop from the experience. For example, try to make training part of your project, so that you start building a plain-language culture internally.