Plain style—Plain style stresses clear wording and simple prose. It is most often used to instruct, teach, or present information. Plain style works best in documents like technical descriptions, instructions, and activity reports.Eight Guidelines for Plain Sentences: GUIDELINE 1: THE SUBJECT OF THE SENTENCE SHOULD BE WHAT THE SENTENCE IS ABOUT. Confusion often creeps into texts when readers cannot easily identify the subjects of the sentences,GUIDELINE 2: THE SUBJECT SHOULD BE THE "DOER" IN THE SENTENCE. GUIDELINE 3: THE VERB SHOULD STATE THE ACTION, OR WHAT THE DOER IS DOING.GUIDELINE 4: THE SUBJECT OF THE SENTENCE SHOULD COME EARLY IN THE SENTENCE. Subconsciously, your readers start every sentence looking for the subject. The subject anchors the sentence, because it tells readers what the sentence is about.GUIDELINE 5: ELIMINATE NOMINALIZATIONS. Nominalizations are perfectly good verbs and adjectives that have been turned into awkward nouns.GUIDELINE 6: AVOID EXCESSIVE PREPOSITIONAL PHRASES. Prepositional phrases are necessary in writing, but they are often overused in ways that make text too long and too tedious. Prepositional phrases follow prepositions like in, of, by, about, over, and under. These phrases are used to modify nouns.GUIDELINE 7: ELIMINATE REDUNDANCY IN SENTENCES. In our efforts to get our point across, we sometimes use redundant phrasing. For example, we might write "unruly mob" as though some kinds of mobs might be orderly. Or, we might talk about "active participants" as though someone can participate without doing anything.GUIDELINE 8: WRITE SENTENCES THAT ARE "BREATHING LENGTH." You should be able to read a sentence out loud in one breath. At the end of the sentence, the period (.) signals, "Take a breath." Of course, when reading silently, readers do not actually breathe when they see a period, but they do take a mental pause at the end of each sentence. If a sentence runs on and on, it forces the readers to mentally hold their breath. By the end of an especially long sentence, they are more concerned about when the sentence is going to end than what the sentence is saying.
