Clear writing requires the author to put themselves in the readers' shoes. It's not a mechanical translation of complex language to plain language. Short senten

Clear writing requires the author to put themselves in the readers' shoes. It's not a mechanical translation of complex language to plain language. Short sentences with simple vocabulary can easily be confusing as well, especially if the shortening involves truncating important information. For instance, the web page gives the following example: "A strong tremor in her hand makes it impossible for her to use American Sign Language." is thought to be too complex, and got turned into "Her hand shakes so she does not do sign language." This is an absurd change in my opinion. The second sentence implies that sign language is not doable if people have shaky hands, which is false. This would confuse any sign language user who has shaky hands. The original sentence tells us that it is the badness of her tremor that prevents her from signing, which really puts an emphasis on the profoundness of her disability. A more sensible change would be "Her hands are too shaky to do sign language." Moreover, plain-ization turns that coherent paragraph to pieces of information dump. This is fine if the intent is to do an info-dump, (government documents, for example). In most cases, though, the author is making a point. There is the proposition, the supporting evidence, the causes, and the effects. That's why writers vary their sentence structure: to bring out the relationship between one sentence and the next. Some plain language examples on this web pages throw away all of those, so while making individual sentences easier to read, it disintegrates the coherence of the whole paragraph.