ArticleAuthors: Roxanne Backowski; Kate Hinnant; Liliana LaValle (2022)
Plain Language is writing intended to be easily comprehensible
by its intended audience. Used in government, legal, medical,
and now educational writing, the primary goals of Plain
Language are greater usability and equitable access. Current
practices of describing databases to library users prioritizes
marketing language and targets an audience of experts. In this
article, the authors share applying Plain Language to library
database descriptions to make them more understandable to
novice undergraduate researchers. In revising the entire database
list using Plain Language principles, they identified best
practices for database descriptions. Initial usability results from
t... 
