Free Plain English Rewriter

Paste a memo thick with 'pursuant to', 'leverage synergies', and 'at this point in time', and get back what the writer actually meant — direct sentences, active voice, and words people use in conversation.

Plain English is not informal English. The output keeps full grammatical correctness and a professional register while stripping the bureaucratic varnish that hides meaning, buries responsibility, and triples reading time.

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Conversion Steps

Paste the bureaucratic, legal, or corporate text — policy notices, client updates, HR announcements, insurance letters.

Click Rewrite in Plain English and receive the plain-language version.

Scan the swap notes: 'commence' → 'start', 'prior to' → 'before', passive constructions reopened so the actual actor appears in the subject slot.

Restore any term of art your industry legally requires — defined contract terms, statutory phrases, regulated disclosures.

Optionally run the result through the readability checker to confirm the reading level actually dropped.

Before / After

Before	After
Pursuant to recent amendments to company policy, employees are advised that utilization of the main conference room for non-business-related activities is no longer permissible, effective immediately.	Company policy recently changed: please stop using the main conference room for personal events. This takes effect immediately. [Officialese removed; passive construction made direct; 28 → 17 words]

Sample rewrite returned

Who Uses This, and Why

Legalese translation: 'Hereinafter referred to as', 'notwithstanding the foregoing', and 'the party of the first part' become modern equivalents — while defined terms that carry legal weight are flagged for preservation rather than paraphrased away.
Corporate memos and internal comms: 'We are reaching out regarding', 'circling back on', and 'actionable insights' resolve into direct statements of what happened and who must do what by when — the two things every memo reader actually wants.
Government and civic notices: 'The applicant shall furnish documentation' becomes 'you must provide documents'; agency prose built on passives and third-person distancing shifts to second-person instructions a resident can follow.
Insurance and healthcare letters: Denial letters and benefit explanations are rebuilt around the reader's next step — what was decided, why, what to do about it — instead of burying the decision in clause four after three paragraphs of context.
Customer support macros: Template replies lose their stiffness without losing professionalism, turning scripted acknowledgments into responses that sound like one human helping another.
Onboarding and process documentation: Acronym-dense procedure guides get rewritten for someone's literal first week, where institutional shorthand hasn't been learned yet and every undefined term is a support ticket waiting to happen.

How It Compares to Alternatives

A tone changer adjusts warmth while keeping your sentence structure; a casual-to-formal converter pushes the opposite direction of this tool. The sentence simplifier shares goals but attacks length and clause depth, whereas this one targets institutional diction specifically — the vocabulary of committees rather than the syntax of academics. Against human editors: communications professionals know the audience and the political stakes better than any model, and contract language genuinely requires a lawyer's review because plain-English rewording can alter legal effect. Deterministic jargon glossaries never misfire but only catch phrases somebody listed in advance. Use this for drafts and internal clarity; route binding documents through counsel regardless.

Pro Tips From Heavy Users

Name the actor in every sentence: if you can't answer 'who did this?', the passive voice is probably hiding something important.
Give readers one instruction per sentence in policies and notices — stacked directives get skipped exactly when compliance matters most.
Keep legally defined terms verbatim and translate only the connective tissue around them; rewriting definitions creates real liability.
Apply the read-aloud test: if you wouldn't say the sentence to a colleague standing next to you, it isn't plain English yet.
End action requests with a concrete verb and deadline — 'send the signed form by Friday' beats 'timely submission would be appreciated' every time.

Frequently Asked Questions

Isn't formal jargon more professional?

Clarity is the professional standard — government writing guidance and most style manuals now push agencies and companies toward plain language precisely because unclear text costs time and breeds disputes.

Can I rewrite contracts with it?

Use it to draft or understand, never to finalize. Plain-English rewording can change legal effect, so any binding agreement needs a lawyer's eyes on the final language.

Will required defined terms survive the rewrite?

Yes — capitalized defined terms and statutory phrasings are flagged for preservation during the pass rather than casually paraphrased into something legally different.

What tone does the output keep?

Neutral-professional. Bureaucratic padding goes, but the register stays workplace-appropriate — this isn't slangification, it's subtraction.

How does this differ from the sentence simplifier?

Different targets: the simplifier rebuilds long, nested sentences for readability; this one replaces institutional vocabulary and restores hidden actors, even in short sentences.

How much text can I convert at once?

Multi-page documents work, though very long ones are processed in sections. Section-by-section runs also make the swap notes easier to audit before you adopt them.