What this guide is for
This guide sets out the Simplified Public Sector English (SPSE) house style: a plain-language standard for public sector writing. It draws on three sources: a simplified version of ASD-STE100 (Simplified Technical English, a standard originally built for aircraft maintenance manuals), the Basic English vocabulary, and the UK Government Digital Service (GOV.UK) content design guidelines.
It is written for people, not for an AI tool. If you edit reports, guidance, letters, web pages, or other public-facing documents by hand, this guide gives you the rules to apply and enough examples to apply them confidently. There is also an accompanying prompt which you can use to create a Skill with your preferred AI tool to automate this work.
The guide exists as a Github repository at https://github.com/star-one/Simplified-Public-Sector-English
Quick checklist
Before you sign off any piece of writing, check it against this list:
- No sentence is longer than 40 words.
- No paragraph is longer than 5 sentences.
- No semicolons anywhere.
- Every sentence is in the active voice, unless the actor genuinely doesn't matter.
- No word or phrase from the banned-words list (see page with examples, and the companion word list) survives unreplaced.
- Any list of more than 2 or 3 items is a bulleted or numbered list, not a run-on sentence.
- Negative contractions ("can't", "don't") and compound contractions ("should've") are spelled out in full. Ordinary contractions ("it's", "you'll") are fine.
- Headings and titles are descriptive, frontloaded, and never phrased as a question.
- Numbers, dates, times, money, and ages follow the formats set out below.
- No offensive or discriminatory language has been carried over from a source document — flag it instead of quietly editing around it.