Plain language is a trust strategy
People don't trust what they can't understand, and the research shows that clear writing changes what they do.
Most of what's wrong with government communication fits in one sentence: people don't trust what they can't understand. I spent more than two decades working in and around government agencies, most of it translating policy into language people could use. I turned civil rights protections into words a parent or student could act on, and during the COVID-19 response I helped explain public health guidance to communities with good reason to doubt the messenger. The same lesson came back in every assignment and every crisis. Clarity is how an institution earns belief, and every unclear sentence spends some of the trust it has left.
The Trust Problem Starts With the Reader
In September 2025, Pew Research Center found that only 17% of Americans trusted the federal government to do what is right always or most of the time, one of the lowest readings since the question was first asked in 1958. Polarization explains part of that decline. The reading data points to another cause, because a large share of the public struggles to understand what government puts in front of them.
The 2023 Survey of Adult Skills found that 28% of U.S. adults read at or below the lowest proficiency level, up from 19% in 2017. The last national assessment of health literacy, in 2003, found that only 12% of adults were proficient and more than a third scored at basic or below. An agency that writes for the reader it wishes it had is deciding who gets to take part in public life, and the people it leaves out are often the ones its programs were built to serve.
Clear Writing Changes What People Do
The strongest proof comes from field experiments. Economists Saurabh Bhargava and Dayanand Manoli worked with the IRS to mail notices to 35,050 California tax filers who appeared to qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit but hadn't claimed it, about $26 million in all. A simplified notice raised the response rate from 14% to 23%, and a simple notice that also showed the size of the benefit raised it to 31%. The researchers estimated that similar changes nationwide would deliver about $503 million a year to working families. The government had already promised that money, and a confusing letter was keeping it from the people who had earned it.
The H&R Block FAFSA experiment tested the same idea on college aid. Tax preparers helped low- and moderate-income families complete the federal financial aid form during their tax appointments. Among dependent students, the help raised college enrollment by 8.1 percentage points and the share receiving Pell Grants by 10.6 percentage points. Families who received the same aid information without help on the form showed no measurable change. They already had the information, and the form stood between them and the aid.
Smaller rewrites show the same pattern. A Veterans Benefits Administration office in Mississippi rewrote one standard letter and saw confused phone calls fall from 1,200 a year to about 200. In Britain, a customs form rewritten in plain language cut its error rate from 55% to 3%. People who understand a request complete it correctly the first time, and they stop calling the agency to ask what it meant.
Serious Writing Earns Credibility
One study adds a useful complication. In 2024, Harvard's Elizabeth Linos and her colleagues published six experiments with 67,632 participants in Nature Human Behaviour comparing formal and informal government messages. The formal versions got more people to act. Recipients judged the formal sender as more competent and trustworthy and treated the request as more important, while their comprehension stayed the same. Formality and clarity work on the reader separately, so a government letter can sound serious and still say exactly what it means. The institutions that get believed do both.
What This Means for Communicators
Plain language takes more skill to write than legalese. Stating exactly what a law requires in a sentence a person reads once is harder than burying it in a sentence nobody finishes, and a short sentence that stays accurate is the hardest kind to write.
Federal law already asks agencies for this work and gives the public no way to demand it. The Plain Writing Act of 2010 bars judicial review of compliance and creates no enforceable right. Its definition of covered documents excludes regulations, which are among the densest documents agencies produce. The Center for Plain Language's 2022 report card shows the result. Nearly two-thirds of the agencies it graded earned an A for meeting the law's staffing, training, and reporting requirements, while their actual writing averaged a C. Agencies have built the paperwork of plain language without the practice, and that gap hands a real advantage to any institution willing to write clearly.
The Readability Test
Choose the one form or notice your audience must act on for your program to work. Rewrite it in plain language, then hand it to someone who has to use it and ask them to explain, in their own words, what they're supposed to do. Keep revising until they can. The finished product is a tested notice, one document your audience can read once and act on correctly, and it will do more for your institution's credibility than most campaigns. Doubt costs nothing to spread, and a sentence a person can read once and act on is one of the few forms of proof a critic can't fake.
Rewrite the notice your public depends on, and test it on the people who have to use it.
Laura Rodriguez-Carbone was a federal public servant across 7 agencies including CMS, NIH, FDA, and FEMA before being affected by federal workforce reductions in 2025. She founded Explainer Civic Strategies, a Lakewood, Ohio, firm that helps public institutions earn and keep the public's trust. Learn more at explainerconsulting.com.
