The Reading Level Is the Message: Why Experts Who Write Simply Are Trusted More
By Steve Bunker, CEO, Target Patients MD
There is a stubborn belief, common among people who write for a living and even more common among people who write on the side, that sophistication should sound sophisticated. That a serious subject demands serious sentences — long ones, with subordinate clauses and specialized vocabulary and a certain formal distance. The belief feels intuitive and it is almost entirely wrong, and nowhere is it more wrong than in the fields where a reader is deciding whether to trust the writer with something that matters.
The evidence for this is old and consistent. When researchers give people the same information written at two reading levels — one dense and technical, one plain — readers rate the plain version’s author as more intelligent, not less. The effect holds even among expert readers evaluating expert subjects. Complexity of expression does not read as competence. It reads as a writer who either cannot simplify or does not want to, and readers, sensibly, distrust both.
Why the plain sentence signals the deeper knowledge
The reason is not mysterious once you have watched enough people try to explain things. Simplifying is hard, and it is hard in a specific way: you cannot reduce something to its essentials until you understand which parts are essential. The writer who buries a point under jargon is often hiding the fact that they have not fully worked it out themselves — the complexity on the page is a faithful record of the complexity still in their head. The writer who states it plainly has already done the sorting. Plainness is not the absence of depth; it is depth that has been digested.
This is why a genuine expert explaining their field to an intelligent outsider tends to sound clearer, not fuzzier, than the mid-level practitioner. The expert knows which caveats matter and which are noise, so they can drop the noise. The intermediate, unsure which is which, keeps all of it, and the keeping reads as hedging. Readers feel the difference even when they cannot name it, and they extend their trust accordingly.
The fields where this is not optional
For most writing, this is a matter of quality. For a specific set of fields, it is the entire game, because in those fields the writing is doing the work of earning trust before any relationship exists. Medicine is the clearest example. A person deciding whether to see a particular doctor, or whether to act on health information at all, is reading for reassurance that the source knows what they are talking about and can be understood. A page that answers a frightened question in dense clinical prose fails both tests at once: the reader cannot follow it, and cannot tell whether the writer is an expert or merely sounds like one.
The same dynamic governs law, financial advice, and any professional service where the buyer cannot evaluate the product directly and must instead evaluate the provider’s apparent competence. In all of them, the plain-spoken expert has a structural advantage over the jargon-fluent one, because the reader is judging the only thing they can judge — the clarity of the explanation — and clarity is the honest signal.
This is the principle that turns writing into a business asset rather than a decoration, and it is the reason healthcare content marketing is less about volume than about voice: a single page that explains a condition the way a trusted physician would explain it across a desk does more to win a patient than a dozen pages of keyword-stuffed clinical summary. The clarity is not a stylistic choice layered on top of the marketing. It is the thing the reader is actually buying — evidence, delivered in the only form they can assess, that the person on the other end knows their subject well enough to make it simple.
How to write the plain version without dumbing it down
The fear that stops people is that plain means shallow, that simplifying will make them sound like they are talking down to the reader or leaving out what matters. Done badly, it can. Done well, it does the opposite, and the difference comes down to a few habits. Lead with the reader’s actual question rather than the topic’s formal name — someone wants to know “is this chest pain serious,” not to read “an overview of cardiac symptomatology.” Use the ordinary word and put the technical term beside it, so the reader learns the vocabulary rather than being excluded by it. Keep one idea per sentence, because the subordinate clauses that feel sophisticated are usually where the reader gets lost. And say the caveat that genuinely matters while cutting the ten that do not — the discipline of choosing is exactly what signals that you know the material.
None of this lowers the reading level of the ideas. It lowers the reading level of the sentences, which is a different thing entirely, and the gap between the two is where trust is won. A hard idea explained in plain words flatters the reader; an easy idea dressed in hard words insults them. Most professional writing does the second and imagines it is doing something impressive.
The writer who resists all of this, who holds onto the dense register because it feels more credentialed, is optimizing for how the writing looks to a peer skimming it rather than how it works on the reader deciding whether to trust them. In fields where that reader is the customer, it is a costly vanity. The clearest explanation wins, not because clarity is a nicety, but because clarity is the most reliable evidence of understanding a reader will ever get — and understanding is what they came to buy.
About the author
Steve Bunker is the CEO of Target Patients MD, a healthcare-exclusive digital marketing agency that has worked with more than 735 medical and dental practices across the United States and Canada.
