“Personnel engaged in proximity-based operational activities shall ensure adherence to all applicable procedural safety protocols as delineated in subsection 4.2.1(b) of the Hazard Mitigation and Risk Abatement Framework prior to initiating any task-specific environmental interface.”
Go ahead. Read it again. We’ll wait.
Now think about it. If you handed that sentence to a warehouse worker or field tech during their first week on the job, would they understand what to do? Not likely. And that’s a significant problem.
Safey and compliance documents are infamous for being practically incomprehensible. The information they contain isn’t wrong, but the writing makes that information harder to understand and use.
Plain-language technical writing may sound like a way of dumbing things down, but that’s not the case at all. It’s about making sure your target audience can understand what they need to do when they read it.
When Readability Becomes a Safety Issue
It happens more than most companies would care to admit. A worker misses a step in a procedure because it was buried in a wall of text. An inspector misses a critical requirement that’s obscured by legalese. A new hire makes their best guess because a doc makes no sense to them.
These aren’t “what if?” scenarios. They’re happening every day. Year after year, hazard communication failures consistently rank among the most cited OSHA violations, and the root cause isn’t a lack of information at all. It is that the information was not communicated clearly enough for anyone to act on it.
According to https://www.osha.gov/incident-investigation, the underlying causes of workplace incidents almost always involve procedural and communication breakdowns, not just equipment failure or human error.
Clarity in compliance writing isn’t a luxury. It’s a functional requirement.
The problem? Most safety and compliance docs are written with the wrong audience in mind. They’re written for auditors, not for the people who need to process, understand, and implement them.
This can result in a document that covers a liability requirement but becomes a functional liability itself.
“Would a Tired Person Understand This?” – The Test
Before you sign off on any safety or compliance document, it should go through the Tired Person Test, which is just what it sounds like.
Ask yourself or a teammate, “Would someone just wrapping up a long shift, with a full load of priorities on their mind, understand what to do after reading this document once?”
If the answer is anything other than a full-fledged yes, the doc needs more work. You can use these three checks to help you figure out what needs to change:
Read it out loud. Anywhere you stumble over a phrase or even a word, it’s likely your reader will, too. The text shouldn’t sound like legal jargon or robot-speak. It should sound like a no-nonsense, experienced person talking directly to you, the reader, in plain direct language.
Find your longest sentence. Find it? Good. Now cut it in half. Every sentence should carry one idea. If you’re stringing two or more together with “and” or “which” or the dreaded “pursuant to,” you need to split the sentence into two clear statements.
Spot the jargon and clean it up. Reducing jargon doesn’t mean eliminating technical terms. It means making sure that the technical terms you use are clearly defined at their first appearance or listed in a glossary. If it’s an acronym, never assume that your reader knows what it refers to. Spell it out.
Structure That Helps People Act Fast
Think about the act of reading a compliance and safety doc. That reader isn’t lounged out in a comfy chair with a cup of coffee. They’re busy, likely scanning the doc more than reading it.
They’re looking for the step that applies to what they’re doing right now. Your job as the writer is to make that step findable in ten seconds or less.
Headers are your friend. Numbered steps are essential. If your document is a wall of text with few visual breaks, your audience could get lost, frustrated, or both.
The scan test is a useful gut-check here: print your document and flip through it quickly. Can you identify the main sections immediately? Are the warnings obvious? Can you see where one procedure ends and another begins? If the answer to any of these is no, your structure needs work.
Especially for field-ready documentation, visual hierarchy is everything. Warnings should be bold and set apart from the body text. Critical steps should be numbered, not buried in a paragraph. If skipping a step could hurt someone, that step should look different from everything else on the page.
Define Terms Like Your Reader Just Started
One of the easiest ways to create a clear, understandable document is to treat your reader like it’s their first day on the job. You’re not talking down to anyone. You’re just making sure that you’re defining technical terminology to minimize confusion.
Add a definitions section at the front of your document that calls out any specialized terminology. You can include acronyms in that section if you wish (and spell them out at their first appearance in the document).
Formatting Is Not Decoration
Like headers, well-placed white space is also your friend. Consistent fonts, clear heading hierarchies, and reasonable margins are not cosmetic choices. They directly affect how quickly and accurately a reader can process information. They are a readability issue, not a design issue.
A quick formatting checklist for any safety or compliance doc:
- No paragraphs longer than five or six lines
- Consistent heading levels (H1 for main sections, H2 for subsections, never skip levels)
- The same term used the same way throughout (do not alternate between “operator” and “technician” if you mean the same person)
- Numbered lists for sequential steps, bullet points for non-sequential information
- Callout boxes or bold text for warnings, cautions, and critical notes
Clear Writing Is Competent Writing
Plain language doesn’t show a lack of expertise. It’s the proof of it. Anyone can reproduce dense, impenetrable documentation. It takes real skill to translate a complex regulatory requirement into something a person can read, understand, and act upon without a decoder ring.
That kind of writing is what professional communicators do. Not engineers. Not lawyers. Writers who can walk that tight rope between technical content and the human being on the receiving end of it.
If you don’t feel that you have the right person on your staff to handle this, you may want to consider creating a role. It’s a solid investment for your company’s future. If that doesn’t seem feasible, consider bringing in a professional freelance technical writer that can handle projects for you on a piece by piece basis. You won’t regret it.
While checking that box for liability purposes is important, poorly written safety and compliance docs can accomplish the opposite of their intended purpose. Keep it simple. Keep it structured. Keep your team safe.
