Learn the rules, then learn how to break them – a lot of people in a lot of professions have talked about that concept over the years.
It appears in books, oral histories, and 90s TV medical dramas. And the quote is often attributed to different writers and artists online, probably inaccurately.
Content designers know the rules of grammar, and other parts of speech, like verbs and conjunctions. But you’ll rarely hear us talking about them. We’re more likely to talk about why we’re breaking them.
For example, if we’re designing in English, it’s important to understand the difference between the simple present tense and the continuous present tense.
It’s even more important to understand the difference in meaning between continuous present tense in (for example) Indian English versus German English.
It’s more important still to understand how widely understood, or misunderstood, a part of speech is, depending on:
- a person's level of stress
- their progress in learning a language
- the place and time where a person learned the language
- the domains (like home, work) in which people use the language
- what the person is trying to achieve
Knowing all those conflicting rules helps us decide which rules to break, and how.
So does the insight we gain from research.
We often give a prototype to a person who will use it, and learn that the word we thought everyone would understand is confusing or opaque. So we start again, with different words in different places, until it works.
The more experienced we are, and the more diverse our design team, the more quickly we’ll get to a design that works.
We break rules because understandability is more important than correctness. If people don’t understand our design, the design becomes useless or damaging.
I’ve often chosen to use simple tenses (she did, he went, they thought…) in place of a continuous or perfect tense (she has been doing, he was going, they have been thinking…).
I’ve made that choice because, although the continuous or perfect tense tells a more complete and specific story, the simple tense gives enough information for the task at hand, and is more understandable for more people.
And we choose not to use language that is correct and common, but which we know is less clear.
For example, the NHS Style guide tells designers not to use negative contractions, like ‘don’t’. Instead, NHS designers use ‘do not’, based on evidence that people find ‘do not’ clearer and more emphatic than ‘don’t’.
Standard language varieties
We also like to break the rules of standard language varieties.
A standard language variety is the version of a language that is in the dictionary. It’s often, but not always, used in government.
It usually has overt status, which means it’s openly acknowledged as something to admire and aspire to. Doors to the most powerful places in society tend to open for people who use it.
Non-standard varieties open a different set of doors.
They are not associated with the most powerful people in society, but they signal that the speakers are part of a community, with covert power.
And that membership often signals that they are trustworthy, or have a shared understanding with others in the group.
Standardised language is rarely the language people use. In fact, it’s unlikely that anyone has ever used a single language variety exclusively.
Most of us code switch between different languages or different varieties of the same language, depending on where we are, who we’re talking to, and what we want to achieve.
And, as groups who use non-standard varieties become more powerful, that language takes on new meaning.
Style guides are often based on a single, standard language variety. For example, the Economist style guide is based on Standard British English. That helps with consistency, which makes written language much easier to understand.
Style guides that put understandability first, like the Government Digital Service (GDS) or NHS style guides, use a blend of language varieties.
They make evidence-based decisions first. They also build in space for designers to decide, based on evidence, when to break the rules.
People feel emotional about language
People have a deep, often uninterrogated, connection to language. That’s not surprising. It’s a matter of survival – not just our ability to exchange information, but our ability to signal which social group we do (and do not) belong to.
Over my career, I’ve seen extreme reactions by other professionals to linguistic rule-breaking - including shouting, insults, and on one occasion, a smashed computer monitor.
It’s an awkward reality that people who know the least about language sometimes think they know the most.
It’s also a reality that language is constantly changing, and that one person’s plain language is meaningless to someone else.
But a content designer’s goal is always understandability.
