Plain Language on Service Pages: Why Expert Clients Prefer It Too

Many professional firms write their service pages for an imagined peer. A typical engineering consultancy might promise “end-to-end lifecycle solutions,” a law practice might open with “comprehensive representation across a broad spectrum of matters,” and a clinic might list procedures only by their technical names. The reasoning is understandable: clients are sophisticated, and simpler copy might look less expert.

The evidence points the other way. Plain language helps readers find, understand, and use information, and the people with the most expertise often prefer it most. This article draws on the international plain language standard, a usability study of web writing styles, a survey of how people react to legal language, and the UK government’s writing guidance, and applies them to the pages where a business explains what it does.

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Why jargon persists on service pages

Specialist language usually enters a website for good reasons. The firm’s team uses it every day, competitors use it, and it signals membership in a profession. The trouble is that a service page has a different job from a technical report: a visitor arrives with a problem and needs to decide, quickly, whether this business can solve it.

What goes wrong when copy is written for peers

1. The offer is hidden. Abstract phrases describe the firm’s self-image rather than the client’s problem, so visitors cannot tell what is being sold.
2. Scanning fails. Visitors skim for familiar words, and terms they would never search for give them nothing to catch on.
3. Promotional tone erodes trust. Unsupported claims such as “industry-leading” read as advertising, which careful buyers discount.

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What plain language means

Plain language now has an international definition. ISO 24495-1, published by the International Organization for Standardization in June 2023, defines it as communication in which wording, structure, and design are so clear that intended readers can easily find what they need, understand what they find, and use that information.

The standard turns that definition into four principles:

• Relevant: readers get what they need.
• Findable: readers can easily find what they need.
• Understandable: readers can easily understand what they find.
• Usable: readers can easily use the information.

Two details in the standard matter for service websites. First, it is not limited to word choice: structure and design are part of the definition. Second, it says plain language focuses on how successfully readers can use a document rather than on mechanical measures such as readability formulas. A page can score well on a formula and still fail the reader who cannot find the price range or the next step.

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What the research measured

Concise, scannable, and objective web copy

In the summer of 1997, John Morkes and Jakob Nielsen ran a series of studies in Sun Microsystems’ usability labs on how people read on the web. In the measurement study, 51 participants used one of five versions of a travel website about Nebraska. Each version carried essentially the same information in a different style: a promotional control written in marketing language, a concise version with about half the word count, a scannable version with headings and lists, an objective version stripped of promotional claims, and a version combining all three changes.

The researchers combined five measures, including task time, errors, and recall, into an overall usability score. Compared with the promotional control:

Writing style	Overall usability vs. promotional control
Objective (non-promotional)	27% higher
Scannable	47% higher
Concise	58% higher
Concise, scannable, and objective combined	124% higher

An earlier study in the same series had found that 15 of its 19 participants scanned unfamiliar pages before reading them.

Specialists and the preference for plain language

The second piece of evidence addresses the “our clients are experts” objection directly. In 2011, Christopher Trudeau of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s law school surveyed 376 people, about 55% of whom were past legal clients, and published the results in the Scribes Journal of Legal Writing. Respondents saw 11 pairs of passages, one in plain language and one in a traditional legal style, and chose the one they preferred.

They chose the plain version about 80% of the time, and it won on all 11 questions. Preference for plain language rose with education, a statistically significant correlation that ran opposite to Trudeau’s own starting assumption. Among past clients, 44% said they had stopped reading a legal document out of frustration.

The UK Government Digital Service, which sets writing standards for GOV.UK, draws the same conclusion in its guidance: people with higher literacy prefer plain English because it lets them understand information quickly, and specialist readers who can follow complex language still do not want to read it when there is an alternative.

What the evidence does not show

Both studies have clear limits. The Morkes and Nielsen measurement study tested one travel website in 1997, with roughly ten participants per version, and the authors themselves note that they treated conciseness, scannability, and objectivity as on-or-off choices rather than as matters of degree. Trudeau measured stated preference, not comprehension or buying decisions, and distributed his survey through law firms and his own contact lists. Neither study measured inquiries on a service website. Together they show a consistent direction, not a conversion rate you can expect.

“Clients hire expertise. They rarely want to read it in its raw form.”
— Windware Studio Practice Note

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Writing service pages in plain language

A good service page works like a skilled receptionist: it answers the visitor’s first question in their own words, then points to the right next step. The analogy ends at tone. A page cannot read the visitor’s face, so its structure has to anticipate the questions in advance.

Step 1: Start with the client’s problem and words

GOV.UK’s guidance recommends using the words users know and use themselves, and suggests checking common search terms to find them. For a service firm, the same evidence sits in inquiry emails, intake calls, and search queries in your analytics.

Step 2: Rewrite at the sentence level

• The first sentence of each service section says what the service does and for whom.
• Sentences over 25 words are split, and paragraphs stay at five sentences or fewer, as GOV.UK’s guidance advises.
• The active voice names who does what: “We review your contract” rather than “Contracts are reviewed.”
• Specialist terms stay when they add precision, with a plain explanation the first time they appear.
• Promotional claims are replaced with specifics: years in practice, process steps, typical timelines, or scope.
• Long, formal words give way to short ones: “help” instead of “assist,” “buy” instead of “purchase.”

Step 3: Make it findable

Plain wording only helps if visitors reach it. Put the most important information first, use headings that describe the content below them, and break steps and options into lists. The ISO standard’s findable principle and GOV.UK’s structure guidance both point here.

Step 4: Test with readers

ISO 24495-1 states that following its guidelines makes it likely a document is usable, but that the only way to be sure is to evaluate it with readers, continually. For a service page, that can be as simple as asking three clients what the page offers and what they would do next, then fixing what they miss.

Tradeoff to accept

Plain language is not the same as removing every technical term. In some fields, a precise term is what a qualified buyer searches for, and replacing it loses both accuracy and findability. GOV.UK’s guidance allows specialist terms where they are needed, as long as they are explained. The goal is to remove the decoding work, not the expertise.

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Practical takeaways for your next website

1. Write for the reader’s task, not the firm’s self-image: say what the service does and who it helps in the first sentence.
2. Use clients’ own words, drawn from inquiries, calls, and search data.
3. Cut promotional language and replace it with verifiable specifics.
4. Keep sentences short and active, and explain specialist terms on first use.
5. Test pages with real readers, because a readability score cannot tell you whether someone can act on the page.

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