Wikipedia:Plain English

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This is an essay; it contains the advice and/or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. It is not a policy or guideline, and editors are not obliged to follow it.
This page in a nutshell: Wikipedia articles ought to be written in plain English. Jargon, buzzwords, tautologies and vague abstractions ought to be avoided to the greatest extent possible.

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 he bombed the subway and that his 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.

Contents

[edit] Particular problems

[edit] Jargon and technical vocabulary

See also: Wikipedia:Explain jargon

Jargon and technical vocabulary are inevitable in many fields. Whenever using them, explain them briefly or give a Wikilink to help the reader understand the word.

For example, a legal word like estoppel may confuse a reader who is not a lawyer. Estoppel essentially 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;" however, the scholastic method of the law has clouded its meaning over time. The estoppel article should clarify both these points for readers and allow them to understand the word in context.

Jargon and lack of context pose a particular problem in mathematical articles. Wikipedia has many of these articles; many could improve with editing. The difficulty here comes from framing the articles for the right audience. The professional mathematician may find a given Wikipedia article lacking in detail, while lay readers may find it baffling. Information presented from the viewpoint of the sociology of science goes a long way towards making these articles interesting and intelligible to non-mathematicians.

More context is valuable in these situations. As a writer, include some history of the problem the theorem was meant to solve or cite practical applications of the theorem. This sort of information allows a non-mathematician to retain knowledge from the mathematical article.

[edit] Business writing

If the business provides a product or service, describe it concretely and accurately. Wikipedia is not an advertisement service.

[edit] Conflicts of Interest and Vanity Articles

If a person within a company starts an article about that company, it may be considered a conflict of interest: advertising a company versus providing information about it. Nonetheless, the business -- and its article -- may still be considered notable if it provides useful information about the business. Additionally, an employee is better informed and motivated to provide accurate information about his or her business.

[edit] Buzzwords

Inappropriate vagueness and abstractions, especially the vogue words commonly described as buzzwords, are a frequent problem in articles about businesses. An informative, clear, and succintly written article trumps one filled with buzzwords.

Unhelpful:

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

Informative:

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. . . .

Avoid using the word "solution" to describe a business's product or service offerings. The use of this word is inherently non-neutral, since it implies that the business's offerings can indeed solve a problem. It is also inherently vague.

Use concrete nouns to describe a business's products or services. If the business makes or sells things, an appropriate description would tell us what is inside the boxes at the warehouse or on the shelves of its shops. If the business provides services to people, the sorts of problems its representatives discuss with the customers is helpful information. If the business's product is software, the article should provide a specific description of what it does and the intended market:

Unhelpful:

... an enterprise management solution

Better:

... an integrated software suite for warehouse, manufacturing, and sales management

[edit] See also