Plain Language as a Competitive Advantage

There is a strange asymmetry in business writing. Everyone claims to want clear communication, and almost no one produces it. Visit ten company websites in any industry and you’ll find nine of them saying roughly the same thing in roughly the same fog: they empower, they enable, they deliver end-to-end solutions that unlock value at scale. The tenth one, the one that just says what the product does and what it costs, feels almost shocking. And that shock is worth money.

I think plain language is a competitive advantage precisely because it’s so hard for organizations to adopt. Not technically hard. Any individual can write “we sell accounting software for restaurants” instead of “we deliver hospitality-focused financial enablement solutions.” What’s hard is getting a company to allow it. Plain language feels exposed. When you say exactly what you do, someone can disagree with it, or point out that a competitor does it too, or notice that it’s not very impressive. Vague language is armor. It protects the writer from judgment by preventing the reader from understanding anything specific enough to judge.

But the reader pays for that armor. The visitor to your website is not sitting in a quiet room giving you their full attention. They’re on a phone, on a train, half-distracted, deciding in a few seconds whether to keep reading. Every abstraction you make them decode is a toll you’re charging at the exact moment you should be removing friction. Most readers won’t pay the toll. They won’t complain either. They’ll just leave, and you’ll never know that your prose was the reason.

This is why plain language compounds into an advantage rather than just being a nice-to-have. If your competitors all write in fog, and fog causes some fraction of visitors to bounce, then writing clearly doesn’t just make you marginally better. It makes you the only one in the category a skimming reader can actually understand. Comprehension becomes your moat. And unlike most moats, this one is invisible to the people who could copy it, because they can’t see the connection between their prose and their bounce rate. They’ll attribute your success to your product, your pricing, your ads. The idea that you win because a tired person on a phone can parse your homepage in eight seconds doesn’t occur to them.

There’s a status dynamic here worth naming. Jargon is a costume. Companies dress their websites in complicated language for the same reason a nervous speaker uses big words: they’re afraid that sounding simple means seeming simple. But readers make the opposite inference. When someone explains a thing plainly, we assume they understand it deeply, because we’ve all experienced the reverse: the surest sign that someone doesn’t understand a topic is that they can only talk about it in borrowed abstractions. Plain language doesn’t just transfer information faster. It signals competence. It says: we know what we’re selling well enough to say it in small words.

The practical test I use is what I’d call the read-aloud test. Take the first paragraph of your homepage and read it out loud to someone who doesn’t work at your company. If you feel a flicker of embarrassment at any phrase, that phrase is fog. You’d never say “we leverage best-in-class technology” to a person’s face. You’d say “our software is fast” or you’d say nothing. Website copy should survive being spoken. Most of it can’t.

The mechanics of plain language are not mysterious. Short sentences, mostly. Concrete nouns instead of category words: “invoices,” not “financial documents.” Verbs that describe actions people can picture: “sends,” “checks,” “warns you,” instead of “facilitates” and “optimizes.” One idea per sentence, one topic per paragraph. Sentence length matters more than people think, because on a phone a forty-word sentence becomes a wall of five or six lines, and walls get skipped. An eighth-grade reading level is not a concession to unintelligent readers. It’s the level at which intelligent readers can skim without slowing down, and skimming is how everyone reads websites now.

When I built GazeSite, I made readability one of the six areas it grades, and I’ll admit I initially thought of it as the soft one, next to hard things like broken markup and slow pages. I’ve changed my mind. Of all the problems the scans surface, tangled prose may be the most consequential, because it sits at the top of the funnel and taxes every visitor equally. A technical bug affects some users some of the time. Fog affects all of them, all of the time, silently.

The deepest reason to write plainly, though, is what it forces internally. You cannot write a clear sentence about a muddled offering. Plain language is a debugger for thinking. When a team struggles to state what their product does in one short sentence, the problem is rarely the sentence. Companies that insist on plain language on their websites end up with clearer products, because the website keeps catching the muddle early, when it’s still cheap to fix.

So the advantage is doubly durable. Your competitors won’t copy your plain language, because their organizations are structurally afraid of it. And even if they tried, they’d have to first achieve the clarity of thought that plain language demands. That takes longer than redesigning a homepage. Which means that if you start writing plainly today, you’re building a lead that’s hard to see and harder to close. That’s the best kind.