Rewrite a dense document in plain language without losing a fact

A dense document rarely stays on the page. The expense policy nobody can follow comes back as a dozen emails asking what counts as a receipt, and the notice about the new sign-in system comes back as calls to the help desk. The questions land on whoever is known to understand the original, which is often you.

An AI assistant handles the rewriting well: shorter sentences, headings built around the reader’s questions. What it does badly is keep every fact intact. In a smoother sentence, “may be rejected” becomes “will be rejected”, an exception three paragraphs down disappears, and “within 30 calendar days” turns into “within a month”. So this method puts a numbered list of facts between the original and the rewrite, and you check the new version against the list instead of rereading both documents and hoping.

It works for an HR policy, an IT notice, a letter to parents, a public form or a research summary, in Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot. By the end of this, in about an hour, you’ll have a plain version of one document people keep asking you about, checked fact by fact and tested on one real reader, plus a before-and-after page to show your team.

What you’ll be able to do

• Finish a plain-language version of one real document, written for a reader you named, with every fact from the original checked against a numbered list.
• Catch the slips that change the meaning, such as “may” turned into “will” or an exception that went missing.
• Keep three prompts and a rules card for the next document, and a before-and-after page for your next team meeting.

What you need

• One dense document of one to three pages that people keep asking you about, such as a policy, a procedure or a notice. To practice, pick something public, like a notice on your city’s website. For an internal document, swap people’s names for placeholders, and if it holds anything confidential, read Before you upload a client document first.
• A chat assistant such as Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot. You’ll only paste text, so a free account is enough.
• About an hour, a highlighter (or your word processor’s highlight color), and five minutes with one person the document is written for.

Steps

1. Name the reader and what they must do. At the top of a blank document, write two lines. Reader: who they are, what they already know and how they’ll read it, for example “a new employee filing a first expense claim from a phone”. After reading, they must: the action and its deadline, for example “submit a claim with itemized receipts within 30 days”. If you can’t write the second line, the original is doing several jobs at once: rewrite it for the job most readers come for.

2. Get the fact list. Open a new conversation, paste prompt 1 (below) with the original underneath, and send it. You get a numbered table of every obligation, date, amount, condition and exception, with its exact words and the facts it’s linked to.

3. Check the list against the original. Everything after this depends on the list, so give it 15 minutes. Highlight each sentence of the original that carries a fact and find its row. A highlighted sentence with no row is a missing fact: add it. For each quote, search the original for five or six of its words, and check that “must”, “may”, “should” and “will” match. Fix the list by hand and save it.

4. Rewrite for your reader. In the same conversation, paste prompt 2 with your two lines from step 1 and the rules card. Read the doubts at the end of the answer first. If the assistant couldn’t tell who approves something, or found two sentences that contradict each other, ask whoever owns the document instead of letting it guess: that’s a question your readers would have sent you.

5. Check every fact in a fresh chat. Open a new conversation and paste prompt 3 with the checked list and the new version, but not the original, so the assistant judges the rewrite against the list alone. Fix every row marked “changed” or “missing”, and cut anything it lists as unsupported. Then check the rows that matter most yourself (deadlines, amounts, exceptions, every “must” and “may”): an assistant can mark a row “kept” when the meaning has shifted slightly.

6. Read it aloud. Wherever you stumble or go back to reread, shorten or split the sentence. Then read only the headings: on their own, they should show where everything is. If your readers will use a phone, read it on yours.

7. Ask one real reader. Give the new version to someone the document is for who hasn’t seen the original, such as a colleague from another team, a parent or last month’s new hire. Explain nothing. Ask what they would do next, and by when, and where they slowed down. (“Is it clear?” only gets you a polite yes.) If their answer matches your second line from step 1, the rewrite works. If not, fix the spot where they went wrong. For a document that goes to thousands of people, Digital.gov’s guide to paraphrase testing describes the same check with six to nine readers.

8. Publish it and keep the before-and-after. If the original’s exact wording still matters, as with a policy, publish the plain version as a guide that links to it, with a line such as “If this guide and the policy differ, the policy applies.” Put the densest paragraph of the original next to its new version on one page, note how long the job took, and take it to your next team meeting. Then count last month’s replies about the document in your Sent folder, and count again a month after you publish: that tells you whether the rewrite cut the questions.

You’re done when the plain version is out, every row of the fact list is marked “kept”, and the before-and-after page is saved.

Prompts and rules to copy

Prompt 1, the fact list:

Below is a document I want to rewrite in plain language. Before any rewriting, list every fact in it that a reader could act on or be held to.

Make a numbered table with these columns:
# | Type | Exact words from the original | Linked to

- Type: obligation, permission, prohibition, date or deadline, amount, condition, exception, contact, consequence or definition.
- Exact words: copy them as they appear, up to 30 words. Keep must, shall, may, should, will and can exactly as written. Do not paraphrase in this column.
- Linked to: the numbers of other facts that limit, qualify or depend on this one, such as an exception to an obligation.
- One fact per row. If a sentence holds two facts, split it into two rows.
- Include facts in footnotes, tables, headers, annexes and small print.

After the table, quote any sentence you found unclear or contradictory and say why.

DOCUMENT
[PASTE THE ORIGINAL]

Prompt 2, the rewrite:

Now rewrite the document in plain language for this reader.

Reader: [WHO THEY ARE, WHAT THEY ALREADY KNOW, HOW THEY READ IT]
After reading, they must: [THE ACTION, WITH ITS DEADLINE]

Treat the fact list as a contract. Every numbered fact must appear in the new version with the same meaning. Keep must, may and should as in the list, and write "must" where the original says "shall". Do not add any fact, promise, deadline, contact or example that is not in the list.

Follow these rules:
[PASTE THE RULES CARD]

After the new version, list anything you could not place or were unsure about, with the fact numbers, and any question a reader would ask that the original leaves unanswered.

The rules card. Keep it with the prompts and add your organization’s own rules at the bottom. It works without an assistant too: for a short notice, rewriting it yourself with the card beside you can be quicker than three prompts.

PLAIN LANGUAGE RULES

1. Open with what the reader has to do, and by when.
2. Write headings as the reader's questions: "What do I need to send?"
3. Keep most sentences under 20 words, with one idea each.
4. Use the active voice and name who acts: "Your manager approves the request" instead of "The request will be approved."
5. Call the reader "you" and the organization "we".
6. Turn nouns back into verbs: "review" instead of "conduct a review of".
7. Put steps in a numbered list and conditions in a bulleted list.
8. Use everyday words. If a technical term has to stay, explain it the first time.
9. Write dates in full (March 4, 2027) and keep every number as a number.
10. Keep each condition and exception next to the rule it changes.
11. Label examples as examples, and use only examples from the original or from me.

Prompt 3, the fact check, in a new conversation:

I'm checking a plain-language rewrite against the list of facts from the original document. The original is left out on purpose.

For each numbered fact, find where the new version says it, and fill in this table:
# | Status | Sentence in the new version | What changed

- Status: kept, changed or missing.
- Mark "changed" if the meaning shifted in any way: must, may or should swapped; a date, deadline, amount or other number different; a condition or exception dropped or moved away from its rule; a different person doing the action.
- Quote the sentence from the new version exactly.

Then list every statement in the new version that no fact in the list supports.

FACT LIST
[PASTE THE CHECKED LIST]

NEW VERSION
[PASTE THE REWRITE]

For more rules, with before-and-after examples, see Writing for understanding on Digital.gov.

A made-up example

For example, a paragraph from an invented company’s expense policy:

Reimbursement of expenses shall be contingent upon submission of a completed claim form, accompanied by itemized receipts, within thirty (30) calendar days of the expense being incurred. Claims submitted after this period may be rejected at the discretion of the Finance Department, except where the delay is attributable to circumstances beyond the employee’s control, in which case the line manager may authorize late submission. Hotel stays require prior written approval.

Its checked fact list has seven rows. Here are three of them, with their links:

4 | consequence | "Claims submitted after this period may be rejected at the discretion of the Finance Department" | 3, 5
5 | exception | "except where the delay is attributable to circumstances beyond the employee's control" | 4, 6
6 | permission | "the line manager may authorize late submission" | 5

A first draft can read well and still get two of them wrong:

What if I’m late? Late claims will be rejected unless your manager accepts the delay.

Prompt 3 is built to catch both: fact 4 changed (“may be rejected” became “will be rejected”) and fact 5 went missing, so a manager could now accept any delay, for any reason. The corrected version:

How do I get my money back? Send a completed claim form with itemized receipts within 30 calendar days of the expense.

What if I’m late? Finance may reject a late claim. If the delay was beyond your control, your manager may let you submit it late.

Do I need approval first? Yes, for hotel stays. Get written approval before the stay.

The rewrite also exposes a question the original never answers: written approval from whom? Prompt 2 asks the assistant to list questions like this instead of inventing an answer, and this one goes to Finance.

What can go wrong and how to check

“May” becomes “will”, “must” becomes “should”

These slips read perfectly well and change what people do. Besides prompt 3, search the new version for must, may, should, will, can, required and optional, and match each hit to its fact. A requirement turned into advice gets ignored, and an option turned into a requirement brings complaints.

Exceptions drift away from their rule

A rewrite can gather the exceptions at the end, where few readers get to them. Use the “Linked to” column: each linked pair belongs in the same paragraph or list.

Simpler turns into vaguer

“Within 30 calendar days” becomes “within a month”, and “five business days” becomes “a few days”. Search the new version for every number in the fact list. Don’t worry if the new version runs longer than the original: steps, headings and an example take space.

A tone that doesn’t fit

A notice from a public agency shouldn’t sound like a chatty newsletter. If the draft is too casual, paste a paragraph your organization published and liked, and ask for that tone. If it feels stiff, ask for shorter sentences before you ask for warmer words.

Where to go next

You can run the same method on the next document, and these pieces build on it:

• The questions your reader asked in step 7 are the start of an FAQ page built from the questions you answer every week, with your new plain version as its source.
• If the document also goes out in another language, translate the plain version with a short glossary, so the conditions you untangled stay untangled.
• Keep the prompts and the card with your other good prompts, or give them a project of their own with Set up your AI assistant once.

Then pick the next document that keeps filling your inbox, and time it against this one.