The Difference Between Simple and Clear Messages
And why your audience notices the difference.
Writing simply is standard writing advice. I learned it in journalism school.
You may have learned it in your first communications role. Or from your first editor, or in that work style guide gathering dust on your desk.
But somewhere along the way, we shaped our writing to fit the modern appetite for speed. And in our rush to make things shorter and cleaner, we started trimming not just words, but their meaning.
And in the process, guess what? We’ve sacrificed something far more important. Understanding. Comprehension. Context. Depth.
How on earth did this happen, you ask? This is my observation from years of communications experience in the workplace:
we mistook simplicity for clarity.
When simplicity isn’t the same as clarity
In my experience, many people mistake the tool for the outcome. Let me explain. Simplicity is a tool for messaging, yes. It can help us get to clarity. But it isn’t clarity itself.
We often assume that if something is short or minimal, it must also be clear and understandable. Right? Well, that’s not true.
Simplicity and clarity are not the same thing.
Here are the key distinctions.
Simplicity focuses on reduction: fewer words, fewer ideas, cleaner lines. It’s a design choice. A way to make something look or sound easier to grasp.
Clarity, however, is an outcome. It’s about whether the meaning actually lands. Whether the person on the other side truly understands what’s being communicated. Does this sound familiar?
You can have something that looks beautifully and simply written. But it’s still confusing. Why? Because essential context and explanations to clarify background have been stripped away.
Achieving real clarity in our diverse, multilingual world often requires more words, not fewer. There’s nuance, for one. Otherwise, there’s more room for misunderstanding and misinterpretation, for any number of reasons.
It may need more structure. More examples, ones that people can relate to, and context, to help the reader or listener make sense of what’s being said.
Sure, brevity can sharpen meaning, but it can also cut it down to the bone.
The research that sheds further light
Simplicity achieves clarity best when it reduces clutter without reducing understanding.
Here’s proof that challenges what we’ve been taught. In 2021, researchers analyzing nearly 1,600 employees’ digital communication found that word use similarity, not simpler language, was the main driver of interaction.
When communicators mirrored the vocabulary their audience already used, engagement rose. The study by Fronzetti Colladon, Saint-Charles, and Mongeau tracked employees interacting on a company’s intranet forum. They measured what actually made people respond, connect, and engage with each other’s messages.
The finding is striking:
the key to connection wasn’t making language simpler. It was making it familiar.
This matters because it reveals something most style guides miss.
Being clear isn’t just about cutting words or choosing common vocabulary. It’s about alignment. It’s about speaking the language that already lives in your audience’s world.
That’s a different challenge entirely.
And this challenge is only getting harder.
Unfortunately, we live in a world that prizes the quick take.
Social media posts, headlines, and even policy briefings are designed to be skimmed, not studied. I shake my head thinking about this.
Because the problem is that we’ve started to confuse speed with understanding.
When everything has to fit in a caption, a tweet, or a slide deck, nuance becomes the first casualty.
The danger of over-simplification is that it sounds convincing.
A neat phrase gives the illusion of truth. For example, “less is more,” “work smarter not harder,” “innovation is the answer.”
But these slogans flatten complex realities into lines that feel wise, while saying almost nothing.
And in the age of AI, algorithms decide what gets seen and what gets buried. Tools promise to make our writing simpler, clearer, more engaging, all with a single click.
But here’s what these tools can’t do: they can’t know your audience’s world.
They can’t mirror the specific language that lives in your team’s emails or your community’s conversations. They make thinking look effortless.
They can optimise for simplicity, but they can’t guarantee clarity. That still requires a human who understands the difference.
Clarity, compared to simplicity, takes work.
It forces you to slow down, to explain what you mean, and why it matters.
It asks for curiosity, not just cleverness.
In clear writing, you can feel the care someone took to make sure the reader wouldn’t get lost halfway through.
It’s an act of generosity, not performance.
How to build clarity (not just simplicity)
If you’re writing something that matters, a briefing, a proposal, or an email to your team, here are three practices that move you from simple to clear:
1. Know what you want the audience to do, think, or feel after reading
In other words, what’s your communication goal? The purpose of your draft or message will help you work this out. If that’s fuzzy in your mind, it will be fuzzy on the page. True story. If you don’t understand it, neither will your reader.
Clarity starts with intention, not vocabulary.
2. Mirror the language your audience already uses
The 2021 research backs this up. It’s also something I learned early as a writer. Write in a person’s or community’s everyday language.
How do you find out your audience’s language? Read and ponder the words that appear in their emails to you. Warning that AI makes that harder now with prompts often built into email responses. But if you listen to how people speak in meetings and everyday conversation, that will help you overcome the AI effect.
Note the meaning of their words and usage, and make sure that the words you use mean what you intend.
When you echo the everyday common phrases, your ideas will feel less foreign and more actionable. They land better because they’re understood.
This isn’t about dumbing down. It’s about building alignment. And you do that using a common language, not necessarily your language or your team’s language. Is this making sense?
3. Test for clarity, not just simplicity
Test your writing out by getting feedback. Check it yourself first, then seek out the views of those whose views and wisdom matter to you.
These are the questions to test for clarity:
Will the reader know what action I’m asking them to take?
Have I assumed knowledge they might not have?
Could someone act on this without sending me 2, 3 or more follow-up questions to clarify?
If any answer is no, your writing is simple but not clear. Keep refining. Be willing and open to feedback that will help you understand your audience better.
Make sure that at least one of the opinions, or message testers, is a member of the community or target audience you’re trying to reach through your messaging. That’s how we learn and improve.
Otherwise, what’s the point of asking?
If you’re only interested in hearing yeses to these questions, you’ll never get the reality check needed.
Because my friend, the reality is that when we strip ideas down too far, we lose meaning, we lose understanding and we lose context. Most of all, we lose the audience’s trust in our ability to understand their communication needs.
We question their questions. And in doing so, we lose the opportunity to build bridges of understanding.
The current assumption is often that people won’t read more than a sentence or two.
But most people want to understand. They need more information. They need context and that requires explanation and a little bit (or more) of detail.
Simplicity matters, absolutely. But clarity is what truly shifts the dial for people.
The first makes it easy to read; the second changes the mind.
And maybe that’s the real challenge of communicating in this age of noise and algorithms. To resist the temptation, or dampen down the desire, to sound clever and impress people.
Instead, why don’t we use this time to genuinely focus on our readers’ and listeners’ needs?
What does that look like?
It requires a focus on our audiences and their needs, not ours. It’s about being generous with our writing. Making sure that we don’t strip away context and understanding. Taking people’s questions for clarification seriously.
Using our critical thinking skills. Encouraging opportunities for people to ask questions. Otherwise, what’s the point?
Because in the end, it’s not how little we say that matters. It’s how much truth and understanding and connection we build with our audiences, our listeners and readers. That’s my blunt view.
Source:
Fronzetti Colladon, A., Saint-Charles, J., & Mongeau, P. (2021). “From words to connections: Word use similarity as an honest signal conducive to employees’ digital communication.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.06133. https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.06133