Luton Borough Council

Best practice for written content

The guidance on this page lists the best practice guidance for making sure any content you write is easy to understand. It is important to remember that the average reading age in the UK is just 9 years old, so using plain languge is essential.

Before you start

Before you start, consider your content and answer these essential questions.

Is the content necessary?
What is my key message?
What are you trying to achieve?
Who is it for and what do they want?
Is it clear what they need to do?
Does this information exist somewhere else, and if so can I just link to it?

Put your most important point first

Get straight to the point. Visitors will look at the first few words of a paragraph and decide whether it’s worth reading the rest. The majority of users access our website from mobile or tablet devices, making short, clear content even more important.

Keep it short

Big chunks of can be harder to read due to the lack of white space around longer paragraphs. Follow these guidelines:

keep sentences simple with no more than 20 words
avoid where possible subordinate clauses, semicolons and brackets
use bullet points instead of a list in sentence form
paragraphs should be no longer than 4 to 5 lines

It is even more important to be aware of spacing and white space for movile users as the screen is smaller. If the whole screen is taken up with one very long paragraph, it is much harder to read.

Use plain English

The average reading age in the UK is 9 years old. These pointers will make your content easier to read:

use easy to understand words
tell people what they need to do
keep sentences and paragraphs short
avoid words and phrases in other languages such as vis-à-vis
avoid jargon
avoid acronyms unless widely recognised such as HMRC or BBC
explain an acronym if you must use one tjat isn't widely recognised
don’t assume that the reader has any prior knowledge of the subject
use million or billion for people or animals: 1 million people, 25 million rabbits, the world population is 7 billion
in headings and titles always use m, bn or tn
spell out a number if it starts a sentence, for example: twenty five pupils visited the school
use active voice rather than passive voice

Capital letters

Capital letters are harder to read. When you learn to read, you start with a mix of upper and lower case but you don’t start understanding uppercase until you’re around 6 years old. At first, you may sound out letters, merge sounds, merge letters and so learn the word. Then you stop reading it.

At that point, you recognise the shape of the word. This speeds up comprehension and speed of reading.

As writers, we don’t want people to read. We want people to recognise the ‘shape’ of the word and understand. It is a lot faster. As capital letters are 13 to 18% harder for users to read, we try to avoid them.

Use lowercase for council and government in all digital formats, except when used as part of a name, for example Luton Council.

Tone of voice and writing style

We use a more informal, conversational style of writing as research on writing for the web supports this.

We also you ‘active voice’ as, not only do readers move more quickly through active voice text, but they prefer it and feel more familiar with it.See GOV.UK research).

This means we:

address the user as you
talk about the council as us and we
do not use a capital letter on council unless writing the full name Luton Council or Luton Borough Council
always use the word councillor instead of member as member means nothing to the public
never use the abbreviation 'cllr' as it confuses screenreaders!
only use the full title of an act, group, partnership or document the first time on each page - after that just refer to it as the act, the group, the partnership, the document, the plan or the strategy in lower case

Active voice

Active voice in writing and speaking is where the subject performs the action. For example, 'the dog chased the cat'. This is easier to understand than 'the cat was chased by the dog', particularly for people whose first language is not English and those with learning difficulties or a younger reading age.

Active language is easier to understand because:

the structure of 'subject-verb-object' makes it clear and direct
it uses less words so it is more concise than passive voice
the subject of the sentence is the one doing the verb
is clearer to understand

Keep content active and include a verb. You can use words like how, what and when to introduce active words, for example 'When applying for a…' or 'Tell you... when you apply'.

Examples of active vs passive:

active: the team calculated the pH
passive: the pH was calculated by the team

active: Ben kicked the football
passive: the football was kicked by Ben

Tables

Use tables to present data or information that can be organised in a structured way. This could consist of numbers, text or statistics.

As tables can be difficult to navigate on a tablet or mobile device, do not use tables for cosmetic reasons or when you can use normal page structure to present the information, for example headers or lists.

Navigation

Users will automatically look to the navigation for more options so you don’t need to:

refer to the website navigation in your content (for example click on the left)
repeat the list of links available in navigation on your content page

Bullet points

You should use bullet points to make text easier to read. Make sure that:

you always use a lead-in line
the bullets make sense running on from the lead-in line
you use lower case at the start of the bullet
you don’t use more than one sentence per bullet point - use commas or dashes to expand on an item
you do not put ‘or’ or ‘and’ after the bullets
if you add links they should appear within the text and not as the whole bullet
you do not put a semicolon at the end of a bullet
there is no full stop after the last bullet point

Use numbered steps instead of bullet points to guide a user through a process.

FAQs

FAQs are not usually advised. Your content should tell the user everything they need to know with needing FAQs. Read about why FAQs are bad.

Headings and titles

Headings and titles should be meaningful and straightforward. They should make sense on their own. Use sub-headings to split your page into sections and make it easier to scan. Readers will choose what they need to read based on headings. Sub-headings must be used in a meaningful order.

Headings and titles do not need to be written with initial capital letters - see capital letters on page 3. Use capital letters for the first word and proper nouns only for headings and titles.

Hyperlinks

For all links:

do not display the link in full as screen readers will read out ever charater, for example: http://example.com:8080/livecluster/rest/engine/log-url-list
use link text to describe what it will link to, for example 'find out when your bins will be collected' (see writing good link text – GAIN)
for example, never just use ‘click here’ or 'open this document'
external links should not open in a new window
link to external sites with caution as we cannot govern the quality or accuracy content
if you do link to an external site, make sure the link goes to the specific page it refers to, not just a home page

Double spaces after full points

Using additional space after a full stop (usually a double word space) is an older typing convention. This convention isn’t used in contemporary content and doesn’t need to be used on websites because it introduces variation in horizontal spacing.

Documents

PDFs and Word documents should be avoided wherever possible. They work less well for mobile users and often have accessibility problems. Google Translate (tool used to translate content of a webpage) will not translate documents so readers may miss the main message if it is contained within a document.

Spreadsheets can be used but must be published in open document formats.

Use a document only when:

the document is more than 40 pages long
it will be useful for the user to have an offline version at a later date

Document guidelines:

keep the file size low, under 2mb is ideal
test the document for accessibility before you upload it
do not use background colours – think of the customer’s ink cartridge if the decide to print it
check the document opens the right way
name documents so they make sense once printed
add clickable contents to long documents to make them easier to navigate