The Plain English Check

25 pages that passed every check and still read like a textbook

In August I wrote 25 service pages for a law firm with AI. Every page passed my automatic checks: no marketing buzzwords, the right number of questions and answers, sources on every page. Then the attorney read one and asked me if it was really plain English. It wasn't.

The page said a missed mortgage payment "can generally be cured." Every word of that is legally right, and no homeowner talks that way. The instruction to write in plain English was in four places the AI read before writing. It broke it on all 25 pages anyway.

What fixed it was a simple check run on every page: a list of words to swap, a list of words to explain and a limit on sentence length. The first honest run found 119 problems across the 25 pages. Now a page can't go out with even one.

The check

Copy it into a document and fill it in once for your business. It takes about 20 minutes, and you'll keep adding to it.

Business: [name]
Who reads it, in their own words: ____________
    (for example: "homeowners who are behind on their mortgage")

1. Words to swap (they have an everyday version)
    ____________  →  ____________
    ____________  →  ____________
    ____________  →  ____________

2. Words to explain the first time (they have to stay)
    ____________ : ____________
    ____________ : ____________

3. Longest sentence allowed: 35 words

4. Phrases I keep repeating: ____________

5. Phrases my readers don't say: ____________

Done when: every page has been run through the prompt below and nothing comes back.

How to fill it in

Each part has a plain way to do it. The right-hand column is what it found on the law firm's pages.

The prompt

Paste in your lists from the check and one piece of writing at a time. Use it on anything AI writes for you: web pages, emails, posts, product descriptions.

Below are my plain English rules and a piece of writing. Check the writing against these rules only.

My readers: [who reads it, in their own words]
Words to swap: [word → everyday word, one per line]
Words to explain the first time they appear: [one per line]
Longest sentence allowed: 35 words
Phrases to avoid: [one per line]

For every sentence that breaks a rule, show me:
- the sentence, quoted exactly
- which rule it breaks
- a plain rewrite that keeps the same meaning

Don't change anything that already follows the rules, and don't add anything new.

Writing to check:
[paste here]

The last instruction matters. Without it, AI tends to rewrite the whole thing in its own style, and you lose the parts that already sounded like you.

Three things I learned running it

• Run it while writing, not only at the end. On the law firm job the check started out as the last step, and rewriting a finished page meant writing it twice.
• Loosen a rule when it flags good writing. My first version flagged "flat fee," which is normal American English, and "the person the court appoints." I loosened it three times in one day. A check that flags good writing gets ignored, and then it catches nothing.
• Add to the lists every time. When you find a new word your customers wouldn't use, put it on the list straight away, or it slips through on the next page.

About Andrew Voskov

Andrew Voskov is the founder of Cherry Pi AI. He spent twenty years running online businesses before AI, and now writes and checks AI content for small businesses, including a law firm's whole set of service pages. The full story of that project is in the law firm case study, and there's more about small business marketing on the services page.