Free guides

We want to help as many people as possible use plain English. For that reason, we produce a series of free guides to help you. The guides are provided in Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format.

General guides

• How to write in plain English (PDF, 78KB)
• The A to Z of alternative words (PDF, 177KB)

Glossaries

• The A to Z of financial terms (PDF, 85KB)
• The A to Z guide to legal phrases (PDF, 337KB)

Special subjects

• Bibliographies (PDF, 21KB)
• Guide to design and layout (PDF, 35KB)
• The plain English guide to forms (PDF, 16KB)
• The plain English guide to writing letters (PDF, 18KB)
• How to write medical information in plain English (PDF, 171KB)
• Ten tips for proofreading (PDF, 50KB)
• How to write reports in plain English (PDF, 321KB)
• Tips for clear websites (PDF, 49KB)
• Plain English Campaign's guide to words about words (PDF, 249KB)
• Writing business emails (PDF, 54KB)
• The Plain English guide to CVs (PDF, 73KB)

Grammar guides

• Basic grammar - parts of speech (PDF, 23KB)
• Capital letters (PDF, 25KB)
• Punctuating bulleted lists (PDF, 27KB)
• Punctuating sentences (PDF, 39KB)
• Using apostrophes (PDF, 24KB)
• Using hyphens (PDF, 23KB)

We own the copyright to these guides. You are welcome to print out any of the guides or save them to disk for your own use. You must contact us to get our permission if you want to use any of the material in your own publications or on your website. If you want to use the free guides internally on your company intranet, you can do this for £200.

Drivel Defence

Drivel Defence is a software package that has been developed to help writers check their use of plain English. It has two tools - Drivel Defence for Text and Drivel Defence for Web. Each provides a detailed report but does not make any changes to text.

You can download Drivel Defence from the webpage below.

Drivel Defence