Three proven hacks to ease your research application plain English summary

How plain is plain? How English is English? How summary is summary?

Apr 08, 2025

So you’ve got to the part of your application where someone’s asking you for a ‘plain English summary’ of your study. Another hoop to jump through, apparently.

(Scroll down for the actionable info, as always)

It’s tempting to cut and paste the abstracts. After all, they’re summarised, they’re in English if that’s what you speak, and it’s undeniably tempting to use one you made earlier like an, tweak it a little, and move on.

But they’re not ‘plain’. They’re compacting as much information into as few words as you can, which means you’ll have a bunch of dense, technical, precise words. They’re the opposite of plain.

So what’s the difference?

Audience.

Abstracts are for people who are sufficiently specialist that they’ll be reading a peer reviewed journal. They will understand the acronyms and technical jargon because they’re, shockingly, your peers.

Plain English summaries are specifically for people who, annoyingly, aren’t you – patients, public, non-specialist funders, policy makers, the media. They’re people in the supermarket queue, or your family, or some random who has no knowledge of your job at all. (I often write as though it’s just for one reader. And it often turns out to be true).

There are three stages to coming up with one:

Stage One: Imagine you don’t know what you’re doing. Make a conscious shift of mindset from how you think, with all your detailed knowledge of your work, to someone who’s never heard of it.

Stage Two: Leave the (detailed) facts out of it. Your aim is to get the audience to understand the gist, so they can ask you questions to clarify and fill in more details. You are not doing a braindump of All The Facts. Less Keir Starmer, more Boris Johnson, but with fewer unacknowledged children.

Stage Three: Write some words, in a line, one after the other. Sadly, this is always necessary at some point in order to have written. If nobody’s mentioned a word count, 300 words is a good length to aim for. This will need to be in simple words (more on that below).

I talk about the stages one and two in another post, so now I’m going to focus on the ‘writing words’ part for now, with a bunch of language hacks.

Hack 1 – Go with the brain’s grain

The more often we come across a word or idea, the stronger the neural paths it uses, and the quicker and easier our brains deal with it. Most people come across shorter words more often, so their brain has to do less work when they see them. Technical terminology tends to use longer, more complicated words and most people don’t know them. So use common words and you’ll be understood more easily.

After your first draft, methodically replace every uncommon word with a common word. Thesauruses are your friend.

Contrary to most people’s image of them, thesauruses aren’t huge dangerous creatures at all. They’re shy and hide in the lexigraphical undergrowth after the other dinosaurs called them nerds.

A few examples:

Replace With

deleterious - harmful

disseminate - issue/send

endeavour - try

erroneous - wrong

expeditious - fast

facilitate - ease/help

inception - start

You get the gist. (Also, obscure words really don’t sound clever. They make you sound like a pompous and defensive academic, if such a thing could ever exist. Ludicrous idea, I know.)

Hack 2 – Toddlers are your friend

‘Toddler’ sentences anyway – like toddlers, they’re short and energetic.

Written resources created in the academic research space centres on the complicated and nuanced – and often, but not always, necessitates qualifying phrases – in which a key piece of etymologically expressed conceptual artefact is obfuscated and leads to complicated, nuanced sentences, with many subclauses and not infrequently in the passive voice.

I did that deliberately. It’s an awful sentence.

If you got lost halfway through, it translates to: ‘scademics write long complicated sentences which are hard to understand’.

Add in a bunch of unusual words (as in Hack 1) and plain English is galloping off into the sunset on the back of a playful thesaurus.

The short version above is also in the active voice, rather than the passive.

Passive is where something is done to someone, often making it unclear who’s doing what to whom.

PASSIVE: The mat was sat on by the thesaurus.

ACTIVE: The thesaurus sat on the mat.

For example: ‘It was thought that...’ is passive. Who knows what was doing the thinking to the thought? On the other hand, ‘researchers found that...’ is active.

Swivelling your sentences round into the active voice will instantly make them shorter and easier to understand (8 words for passive mat-sitting, vs 6 for active mat-sitting)

Hack 3 – Exploit the ignorant

Get someone ignorant to check it – ignorant in the true sense of ‘having no knowledge about what you’re doing’, rather than the more general sense that applies to American presidents. Spouse, friends, family, possibly a patient panel (though patient panels start off usefully ignorant but after a little while become knowledgeable, which is genuinely not what you want).
Leave it as long as you can before you re-read it. Days. Weeks. Months. Years. Long enough to forget.
Read it backwards. (Sentence by sentence backwards, rather than letter by letter backwards. Driew eb dluow taht). It stops your brain getting involved in the progression of sentences, and only seeing what it’s expecting
Read it out loud, record it, and play it back. Or get Word to do that for you – https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-the-speak-text-to-speech-feature-to-read-text-aloud-459e7704-a76d-4fe2-ab48-189d6b83333c. You will pick up many things that sound wrong and horrible.
Print it out. Or put it in a different font. Or in columns. Or read it on your phone. Anything to prod your brain out of seeing what it’s expecting.
Cut and paste it into Hemingway app, https://hemingwayapp.com/, which will give you a score for readability. Aim for below 9.

Put all these together and you’ll have Plain English Summary which explains what you’re doing in a way that people will understand it, which is part of a successful application, as well as helping make science better by allowing as many people as possible to contribute their thoughts and experience.