Simple writing is difficult to pull off. Making a complex topic 1) readable and 2) understandable poses a huge challenge, as anyone who's tried to read any sort of technical manual knows.

The most important thing to do in your writing is consider your target audience. Stack the odds in favor of them taking the time to read what you've written and understanding what you've said. It's becoming more and more important to bring your message in the simplest terms possible and to take advantage of every tool at your disposal to help your audience digest it.

Write Bite-sized

People are busy, and there is a lot of noise out there, a lot of badly or "ramble-on-and-on" writing. It's easy to click away or trash the message if something isn't catching the eye. This article from the Inside Firefox blog stresses this point, and gives some good examples of things to keep in mind when writing:

Making important points up front
Clear taxonomy of headings, and lots of them
Writing clearly and succinctly
No long, unbroken paragraphs or tracts of text.
Preferring bulleted lists with clear points to paragraphs.
Use of emphasis in formatting to make important things clear

Write Basic


Comprehension of your message is another major consideration in your writing. An article in Brian Clark's Copywriting 101 series includes a very sad statistic taken from a recent college student literacy study:

A study released today shows that more than 50 percent of students at four-year schools and more than 75 percent at two-year colleges in the United States could not:

• interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure;
• understand the arguments of newspaper editorials; or
• compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees.

Taking the time to write succinct, well-organized material will pay off, because it is quite likely that your target audience will fall into one of the two categories.

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Copywriting 101