Plain language at scale: writing for 30 million businesses

At Meta, I led content strategy for Meta for Business, including redesigns and audits of web content that reached 30 million businesses around the world. That audience changed how I wrote.

Our readers weren't marketing directors who read copy for a living. They were bakery owners checking their phones between customers, contractors reading in a second language and people who'd been told to "do social media" with no idea where to start.

Plain language isn't dumbing it down

People hear "plain language" and picture something simplistic, but it's the opposite. Making a complicated thing simple takes more skill, not less. You have to understand the subject well enough to know what to leave out.

The question I kept asking at Meta was simple: What does a busy business owner need to do next? If a page couldn't answer that quickly, it didn't matter how accurate it was.

Plain language also respects the reader's time. A small-business owner is often doing the marketing, the books and the customer service in the same afternoon. Every extra sentence costs them something.

Rules for writing at scale

• One idea per sentence, one job per page.
• The word your reader uses, not the one your product team uses.
• The outcome first, then the feature.
• No idioms or jokes that won't survive translation.
• A read-aloud test: If you stumble, they will too.

The second rule causes the most friction inside big companies. Product teams name features for good internal reasons, and those names often mean nothing to a customer. Our job was to translate. If a reader would search for "how to sell on Instagram," the page needed to say that, even if the official name was something else.

“Making a complicated thing simple takes more skill, not less.”

Write for translation from the start

Content for a global audience gets translated, localized or read in a second language. That changes the rules. Idioms break. Sports metaphors confuse. Long sentences with three clauses turn into tangles in another language.

Writing for translation from the start saves time and money later. Short sentences, consistent terms and concrete examples travel well. So does using the same word for the same thing every time, even when a synonym would feel more elegant in English.

Audits beat instincts

When you have thousands of pages, opinions don't scale. Audits do. We looked at what pages existed, who they were for, what they were supposed to do and whether they did it. A lot of the content overlapped, was out of date or answered questions nobody asked.

Cutting and consolidating mattered as much as writing anything new. The 35% engagement lift on our global content initiative came from both.

Frameworks keep it consistent

With many writers touching many pages, consistency can't depend on one editor catching everything. The content frameworks I built for small and midsize businesses gave the team a shared structure: what goes at the top, how to explain a feature, where the next step lives.

Frameworks sound bureaucratic. In practice, they free writers to focus on the words, because the shape is already decided. They also make reviews faster. When everyone agrees on the structure, feedback can focus on clarity instead of reopening the layout every time.

Test with real readers

Internal reviewers are the worst judges of plain language. They already know what everything means. Whenever possible, I want to see how real customers read a page: where they hesitate, what they skip and what they misunderstand.

Even a few quick sessions with the actual audience can reveal a confusing term or a missing step that a dozen internal reviews missed.

Get leadership on board

Plain language often fails at the approval stage. A clear draft goes into review and comes back with jargon, extra caveats and three new features someone wanted mentioned. Every note makes sense on its own. Together, they undo the work.

The fix is to agree on the standard before the writing starts. I share the reader profile, the one job the page needs to do and a few plain-language principles with stakeholders up front. When they've agreed to the rules, it's much easier to hold the line during review.

Data helps too. When we could show that clearer pages performed better, leaders became some of the strongest advocates for plain language. Results turn a style preference into a business decision.

Short sentences and familiar words also help readers with different reading levels, learning differences or limited time. Accessibility and plain language point in the same direction, and good content serves both.

The short version

Write for the busiest version of your reader, and choose clarity over cleverness every time. Use their words, write for translation and audit before you write. Give your team a structure, so clarity doesn't depend on any one person, and test with real readers whenever you can.